At the 54th EBES Conference, the John P. Rust Best Paper Award went to 

“Distressed Bank Merger and Credit to Innovative Firms: Loan-Level Evidence from a Mega-merger” by Michiru Sawada from Nihon University, Japan.

We would like to thank Springer Nature for their support of the Best Paper Award.

The runner-up paper is “Uninsured Deposits and Bank Stock Price Crash Risk” by Efe Cotelioglu from American University of Sharjah, U.A.E. and Anis Samet from American University of Sharjah, U.A.E.

The third paper is “Directors Gender and Corporate Innovation: Evidence from China” by Guobei Li from Wenzhou-Kean University, China and Yujie Song from Wenzhou-Kean University, China.