Topics in Finance

PhD424 - Spring 2022

The course is offered every year and combines topics in corporate finance and asset pricing. The content and the lecturers may vary from one year to another. In the past, the course covered the following topics in corporate finance: the economics of credit ratings; private firms; financial intermediation; entrepreneurship; M&A; and the following topics in asset pricing: limits to arbitrage and bubbles; decentralized markets; household finance; Bayesian methods in asset pricing; predictability; higher order moments of equity returns; time-inconsistent preferences.

 

Travel Stipends
The Swedish House of Finance offers travel stipends to PhD students from Swedish universities. To apply for the travel grant, please send a brief motivation letter by your supervisor and a budget to jenny.wahlberg.andersson@hhs.se. The Nordic Finance Network (NFN) offers travel stipends to PhD students from other Nordic countries who come from one of the NFN member institutions. Information on how to apply for NFN travel stipends is on http://nfn.aalto.fi/courses.htm.

Assessment
The course grades are Pass with Distinction, Pass or Fail. To pass the course, students are supposed to attend all lectures and submit and present a research proposal by the end of the course. The research proposal should be related to one of the topics of the course. The research proposal should be submitted to Jan Starmans by March 30, 2022. His E-Mail is jan.starmans@hhs.se. The research proposal should be self-contained and include an introduction, which includes the research question and the motivation for the project, a literature discussion, the project description, the proposed research design, a conclusion, and a bibliography.