Jessica Jeffers designated first holder of the Marie Sushka Chair at HEC Paris

At a sober and moving ceremony attended by HEC directors, finance faculty and doctoral students, HEC Paris launched the Marie Sushka Chair and named Jessica Jeffers as its first holder.

The launch of the Marie Sushka Chair was at once an institutional milestone and a moment of remembrance. Associate Professor in Finance Jessica Jeffers was designated the first holder of the chair, a designation that organizers noted is exceptional in two respects: it is the first chair at HEC financed by an academic and a woman and the first funded by an international donor.

The ceremony, held in the presence of Dean Eloïc Peyrache, associate deans Andrea Masini and Christophe Pérignon, members of the Finance Department and several doctoral students in finance, remained sober throughout. In the Hall d’honneur, where Marie Sushka's name was added to the Grand Donor wall, the dominant tone was gratitude: for Myron Slovin's gift, for the couple's long relationship with HEC, and for the work that made Marie Sushka such an important figure in finance research.

A PROFESSIONAL CAREER AGAINST ALL ODDS

That relationship with HEC was itself part of the story. For the last three decades, Marie and Myron had regularly visited the HEC Finance Department as Distinguished Visiting Research Scholars. Colleagues repeatedly returned to Marie's generosity with younger faculty and doctoral students, and to the way her guidance helped strengthen the department's research community over time.

Slovin - Sushka's husband, longtime coauthor and the central voice of the launch - spoke not only about her scholarship but also about the cost of building that career as a woman in finance. He recalled a path that began with research for RAND on Soviet naval capacity and ran through American universities, including Arizona State University, where Sushka became a full professor in 1984. This was a time when women in finance departments were rarely if ever honored as full professors. Some of those years, he said, were gruesome and miserable, as misogyny in her field was rife. According to Slovin, those tensions lasted two decades.

What changed, he said, was HEC. Here, Slovin told the audience, Sushka was appreciated for who she was: a tough, hardworking and independent researcher. For the first time in her life, the tensions were gone, she wasn't judged as a woman first, and scholar next. That sentence visibly moved the room. There were tears in Jessica Jeffers's eyes.

A SENSE OF CONTINUITY

In her interview after the launch, Jeffers explained why. Myron was describing everything that Marie had to go through to fight for her career as a woman in finance, she said. It is very moving to hear all of this and to recognize how people like Marie, women like Marie, forged the path for someone like me now. Jeffers added: I feel like I am indebted to people like her.

That sense of continuity is one reason the choice of Jeffers carries so much meaning. She said she was struck by how closely Sushka's agenda overlaps with her own. What's incredible about this chair is that Marie actually worked on some of the same topics that I work on, Jeffers noted, citing empirical corporate finance, governance, private equity transactions, and work that speaks to both top finance journals and empirical legal journals. She added that the chair pushes her to continue with (her) research, push that forward, publish that in the best places possible.

Jeffers also gave the chair an immediate research-facing meaning. She said that a recently accepted Journal of Political Economy paper will, when it is formally published, carry the affiliation Jessica Jeffers, the Marie Sushka Chair at HEC Paris. The paper studies common leadership, situations in which firms share directors or executives and, she said, shows that these links are a strong predictor of collusive agreements between companies. I hope she would be proud to have her name on that paper in a top journal on a topic of governance, Jeffers said.

MULTIDISCIPLINARY… AND RIGOROUS

Although the launch centered on the future, it also returned repeatedly to Sushka's research itself. Slovin traced a line from her early economic history work on U.S. banking to later papers on bank relationships, private equity, governance and restructuring (see the associate paper in the HEC Dare Media Hub devoted to Sushka’s works). His point was that she kept carrying questions from one field into another, rather than treating topics as sealed compartments.

Stefano Lovo, who worked with Sushka at HEC Paris, described that research style in practical terms. Her starting point, he said, was always the fundamental key question and then the best way to test empirically. He called her absolutely rigorous (and) very attentive in the writing. He also emphasized what that presence meant inside the department: after seminars, conversations with Marie and Myron were demanding but also constructive, especially for younger colleagues.

That helps explain why, for all those present at the launch, this chair is more than an act of commemoration. It places Marie Sushka's name on research yet to come, in fields she worked on and in a department she helped strengthen. With Jessica Jeffers as inaugural holder, HEC Paris has given that legacy a forward-looking place in the school's finance research.