Courses
Courses and workshops organized within NFN are open to finance PhD students and faculty from all Nordic universities or business schools irrespective of whether their home institution is a member of NFN.
Past courses
Forthcoming courses
| Topics in Finance | |
|---|---|
| Organizer | Swedish House of Finance, Stockholm School of Economics |
| Instructor | Several members of SSE faculty |
| Dates | January 19 - March 9, 2022 |
| Place | Classes will be held online or at the premises of the Swedish House of Finance, Stockholm |
| Information |
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. More information on the course website. |
| Applications | Please register in advance with the course administrator Jenny Wahlberg-Andersson, jenny.wahlberg.andersson (@) hhs.se. |
| Travel Grant | NFN offers Travel Grants for attending PhD students in finance coming from Nordic institutions outside of Sweden. To apply for the Travel Grant, please use this form and send it to NFN office nfn (@) aalto.fi. Remember to ask your supervisor to also send a short recommendation email. Please, send the application well in advance to make sure that the NFN office has time to process your application and you have a chance to ensure the cheapest tickets available. |
| Empirical Finance: Identification Strategies in Corporate Finance | |
|---|---|
| Organizer | Copenhagen Business School |
| Instructor | Kasper Meisner Nielsen (Copenhagen Business School) |
| Dates | February 23-24, 2022 |
| Place | Copenhagen Business School, Frederiksberg, Denmark |
| Information |
The course is designed to provide an introduction to some of the
empirical methods used to identify causal effects in corporate
finance. We will examine how to estimate causal effects in the
presence of potentially unobserved confounding factors and how to
make proper statistical inference about empirical estimates. The
goal of the course is to provide PhD students with a
methodological framework that will enhance their ability to design
sound identification strategies in the area of corporate finance.
The course content has three main elements: 1. The students will be introduced to the main empirical methods used to identify causal effects in corporate finance. The lectures covers the main econometric challenges as well as guidance on how to estimate causal effects. 2. The course combines lectures on microeconometrics with lectures on seminal papers that apply the empirical methods to research questions in the area of corporate finance. 3. The course has a two problem sets that students must complete. |
| Applications | Registration deadline is February 1, 2022. Link to registration can be found on the course website. Course fee is waived for NFN students. |
| Travel Grant | NFN offers Travel Grants for attending PhD students in finance coming from Nordic institutions outside of Denmark. To apply for the Travel Grant, please use this form and send it to NFN office nfn (@) aalto.fi. Remember to ask your supervisor to also send a short recommendation email. Please, send the application well in advance to make sure that the NFN office has time to process your application and you have a chance to ensure the cheapest tickets available. |
| Empirical Asset Pricing | |
|---|---|
| Organizer | Copenhagen Business School |
| Instructor | Lasse Heje Pedersen (Copenhagen Business School) |
| Dates | March 3-31, 2022 |
| Place | Copenhagen Business School, Frederiksberg, Denmark & online |
| Information |
The course provides students with the empirical asset pricing
tools to analyze equity returns and other data to understand risk
and expected return. The course is structured as follows. The first several weeks consist of online learning in which students watch recorded lectures, work on empirical problem sets, and discuss these on live online or hybrid meetings. The final two days of the course are live (and possibly hybrid for students at other universities). The course content has three main elements: 1. The students will gain access to a large data set of global equity returns and use this data to analyze several topical issues in asset pricing. The lectures include videos with detailed instructions on how to access this data and how to use it to solve problem sets. 2. The course also has a more theoretical element that develops the tools in modern empirical asset pricing such as factor models, multiple testing adjustments, and machine learning. 3. The course has a number of problem sets that students must complete. More information here. |
| Applications | Registration deadline is January 25, 2022. Link to registration can be found on the course website. Course fee is waived for NFN students. |
| Travel Grant | NFN offers Travel Grants for attending PhD students in finance coming from Nordic institutions outside of Denmark. To apply for the Travel Grant, please use this form and send it to NFN office nfn (@) aalto.fi. Remember to ask your supervisor to also send a short recommendation email. Please, send the application well in advance to make sure that the NFN office has time to process your application and you have a chance to ensure the cheapest tickets available. |
| Hedge Funds and Performance Evaluation | |
|---|---|
| Organizer | Graduate School of Finance |
| Instructor | George Aragon (W.P. Carey School of Business, Arizona State University) |
| Dates | April 6-8, 2022 |
| Place | Aalto University School of Business, Espoo, Finland |
| Information |
This PhD mini course exposes
students to recent developments in the literature on the theory
and management of hedge funds. It is intended for doctoral
students in finance and related fields. Topics include hedge fund
trading strategies, compensation, performance evaluation,
liquidity management, operational risk, and the role of
arbitrageurs in capital markets. |
| Applications | Application deadline is March 16, 2022. Application instructions can be found on the course website. |
| Travel Grant | NFN offers Travel Grants for attending PhD students in finance coming from Nordic institutions outside of Finland. To apply for the Travel Grant, please use this form and send it to NFN office nfn (@) aalto.fi. Remember to ask your supervisor to also send a short recommendation email. Please, send the application well in advance to make sure that the NFN office has time to process your application and you have a chance to ensure the cheapest tickets available. |
| Topics in Empirical Asset Pricing | |
|---|---|
| Organizer | Graduate School of Finance |
| Instructor | Tarun Chordia (Emory University) |
| Dates | April 19-22, 2022 |
| Place | Aalto University School of Business, Espoo, Finland |
| Information | More information will be updated on the
course website. This NFN course refers to part
II of the GSF course Empirical Asset Pricing. This intensive
course is worth 3 ECTS credits. |
| Applications | Application deadline is April 8, 2022. Application instructions can be found on the course website. |
| Travel Grant | NFN offers Travel Grants for attending PhD students in finance coming from Nordic institutions outside of Finland. To apply for the Travel Grant, please use this form and send it to NFN office nfn (@) aalto.fi. Remember to ask your supervisor to also send a short recommendation email. Please, send the application well in advance to make sure that the NFN office has time to process your application and you have a chance to ensure the cheapest tickets available. |
| Machine Learning for Finance | |
|---|---|
| Organizer | Nord University |
| Instructor | Doron E. Avramov (IDC Herzliya) |
| Dates | June 20-24, 2022 |
| Place | Nord University, Bodø, Norway |
| Information |
The course gives the
student a fundamental understanding of both elementary and
advanced statistical and machine learning methods used in finance,
with a focus on applications and research methods. The course
gives the students a thorough introduction to topics such as ridge
regression, the Lasso, Adaptive Lasso, Bridge regression,
Regression Trees, Random Forest, and Neural Networks. The course
gives a thorough understanding of methods such as the ordinary
least squares, its shortcomings, and how, for example, machine
learning can improve the estimates and their errors. Machine
learning typically prescribes a vast collection of
high-dimensional models attempting to predict quantities of
interest while imposing regularization methods.
More information on the course website. |
| Applications | A link to the application form can be found on the course website. The deadline for applications is May 2, 2022. |
| Travel Grant |
NFN offers Travel Grants for attending PhD students in
finance coming from Nordic institutions outside of
Norway. To apply for the Travel Grant, please
use
this form and send
it to NFN office nfn (@) aalto.fi. Please, send the application
well in advance to make sure that the NFN office has time
to process your application and you have a chance to ensure the
cheapest tickets available. |
| Behavioral Finance | |
|---|---|
| Organizer | Graduate School of Finance |
| Instructor | Markku Kaustia (Aalto University) |
| Dates | June 27 - July 1, 2022 |
| Place | Aalto University School of Business, Espoo, Finland |
| Information |
Behavioral Finance is an approach to the analysis of asset prices, corporate finance, and financial decision-making in general, that relaxes some key assumptions of neoclassical financial economics. Namely, it considers a larger class of objective functions, not always compatible with expected utility. Second, it entertains the possibility that expectations are sometimes biased, and not updated in a Bayesian manner. Third, it considers how various financial market frictions can form strong 'limits to arbitrage'. This course is designed to introduce doctoral students to these concepts, and to support them in developing behavioral research ideas of their own. |
| Applications | The registration deadline for this course is June 13, 2022. You can find the application details on the course website. |
| Travel Grant | NFN offers Travel Grants for attending PhD students in finance coming from Nordic institutions outside of Finland. To apply for the Travel Grant, please use this form and send it to NFN office nfn (@) aalto.fi. Remember to ask your supervisor to also send a short recommendation email. Please, send the application well in advance to make sure that the NFN office has time to process your application and you have a chance to ensure the cheapest tickets available. |
| Investor Attention and Financial Markets | |
|---|---|
| Organizer | Graduate School of Finance |
| Instructor | Zhi Da (University of Notre Dame) |
| Dates | August 17-19, 2022 |
| Place | Aalto University School of Business, Espoo, Finland |
| Information |
This course offers a doctoral level introduction to “Investor Attention and Financial Markets” by providing an overview of cutting-edge research on the effects of investor attention on investment and corporate decisions, valuations, as well as stock returns. |
| Applications | The registration deadline for this course is August 3, 2022. You can find the application details on the course website. |
| Travel Grant | NFN offers Travel Grants for attending PhD students in finance coming from Nordic institutions outside of Finland. To apply for the Travel Grant, please use this form and send it to NFN office nfn (@) aalto.fi. Remember to ask your supervisor to also send a short recommendation email. Please, send the application well in advance to make sure that the NFN office has time to process your application and you have a chance to ensure the cheapest tickets available. |