Students wishing to take Empirical Finance must apply for a place in this course. The application process is described below.
The course provides students with an understanding of important empirical methods and their application in finance. It covers topics in asset pricing, corporate finance, and market microstructure. Students will learn to perform empirical analysis using the software package Stata. They are expected to acquire, before the course commences, a level of Stata competency comparable to that taught in the Stata Tutorial each semester. The course enables students to plan and carry out empirical research in finance on their own and prepares for an empirical seminar or master thesis in the finance area. Part of the course consists of the practical application of the methods learned in the lecture to various case studies.
Learning Outcomes:
Organisation
The course consists of a lecture and several exercise sessions that deal with the application of the contents of the lecture in various case studies. The lectures provide the conceptual and empirical background and the cases apply the concepts to empirical research examples.
Lecture
Exercise sessions
Preliminary Case Study Schedule
We will inform you in case there are any changes to the new schedule. Information about the time schedule is available on Portal2 under the course title “FIN 603 Empirical Finance”.
Your final grade will consist of a final exam (45%), case-studies write-ups (45%) and participation in the exercise sessions (10%). If the course is offered virtually, participation does not count towards the final grade. You can hand in your case write-ups individually or in groups of up to three students. We strongly recommend working in groups of three.
Participation in the course FIN 604 – Stata in Finance at the beginning of the semester or acquisition of equivalent knowledge is expected. Course materials of the Stata course will be provided.
Please note that we will regard any event of copying, where identical write-ups are turned in or where write-ups overlap or coincide with documents in the public domain, as a breach of the code regulating exams (“Prüfungsordnung”). At a minimum, all group members will receive a failing grade on the respective homework, regardless of whether they provided the original, copied from the original, or had somebody else copying from the original. We keep electronic copies of case write-ups for this purpose (see below).
When presenting your transcript at our secretary's office, you will be required to sign our plagiarism policy. We are commited to fair-play and will therefore treat any incidence of plagiarism as cheating. There will be absolutely no exceptions to this rule. It is your responsibility to hand in only work which is in compliance with our plagiarism rules. If in doubt, contact us before handing in your work.