Topics in Financial Research
Program:
First Offered:
Typical Enrollment:
Credits:
Type:
Ph.D. in Finance
Spring Term 2022
~5
3
Core
The course introduces first-year Ph.D. students to all relevant subject areas in financial research. For each topic, the students are provided with the most impactful articles published in the Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial Economics and Review of Financial Studies in the last 5(-ish) years. Discussed are the topics themselves as well as the data sets and methodologies used in the papers. The goal is twofold: to 'guide' students towards their dissertation topic(s) by exposing them to - and sparking their interest in - different topics and research questions, and to educate them about state-of-the-art research design, methodologies, data sets, and paper structuring/-writing.
Selection of Covered Topics
Banking & Financial Intermediation
Private Asset Markets
Public Asset Markets
Corporate Transactions (M&As, IPOs)
Corporate Finance
Household Finance
Risk Management
Corporate Governance
The 'E' in ESG
COVID-19 & Global Financial Markets
Textbook(s):
No textbooks are used. Readings are solely papers published in Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial Economics and Review of Financial Studies.
Lecture Examples
Class 4
Public Asset Markets
The class covers various recent (empirical) aspects in public asset markets and -pricing. The focus is both on long-term pricing and returns, short-term market impacts of selected events, the pricing of assets relative to each other and the latest advancements in three- or multifactor asset pricing models.
Readings (Ex.):
Bessembinder, Hendrik. 2018. Do Stocks Outperform Treasury Bills?
Journal of Financial Economics 129(3), 440-457.
Boudoukh, Jacob, Ronen Feldman, Shimon Kogan, and Matthew Richardson. 2019. Information, Trading, and Volatility: Evidence from Firm-Specific News.
The Review of Financial Studies 32(3), 992-1033.
Lucca, David O. and Emanuel Moench. 2015. The Pre-FOMC Announcement Drift.
The Journal of Finance 70(1), 329-371.
Class 6
Corporate Finance
The class covers the latest in financial research on the three major topics in (empirical) Corporate Finance: financing decisions, investment decisions and payout decisions.
Readings (Ex.):
Almeida, Heitor, Vyacheslav Fos, Matthias Kronlund. 2016. The Real Effects of Share Repurchases.
Journal of Financial Economics 119(1), 168-185.
Bergman, Nittai K., Rajkamal Iyer, Richard T. Thakor. 2020. The Effect of Cash Injections: Evidence from the 1980s Farm Debt Crisis.
The Review of Financial Studies 33(11), 5092-5130.
Kim, Hyunseob. 2020. How Does Labor Market Size Affect Firm Capital Structure? Evidence from Large Plant Openings.
Journal of Financial Economics 138(1), 227-294.
Class 9
The 'E' in ESG
The class covers the latest in financial research on the topics of sustainable investing, climate risk (-pricing), and investor sentiment towards environmental factors in capital markets, corporate finance and asset management.
Readings (Ex.):
Bolton, Patrick and Marcin Kacperczyk. 2021. Do Investors Care About Carbon Risk?
Journal of Financial Economics 142(2), 517-549.
Alok, Shashwat, Nitin Kumar and Russ Wermers. 2020. Do Fund Managers Misestimate Climatic Disaster Risk?
The Review of Financial Studies 33(3), 1146-1183.
Hartzmark, Samuel M. and Abigail B. Sussman. 2019. Do Investors Value Sustainability? A Natural Experiment Examining Ranking and Fund Flows.
Journal of Finance 74(6), 2789-2837.