Courses
Courses and workshops organized within the 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 the NFN.
NFN Travel Grant
The NFN offers Travel Grants for attending PhD students in finance coming from Nordic institutions outside of the country where a given course takes place. To apply for the Travel Grant, please use the form below and send it to the NFN office at 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.
Note: The NFN office is closed for summer holidays from June 28 to July 27, 2025. No travel grant applications will be processed during this time.
Past Courses
You can consult a list of past courses here
Forthcoming Courses
| Continuous Time Finance | |
|---|---|
| Organizer | Swedish House of Finance, Stockholm School of Economics |
| Instructor | Johan Waldén (Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley) |
| Dates | July 29 – August 7, 2025 |
| Place | Stockholm School of Economics, Stockholm, Sweden |
| Information | The development of derivatives markets may be the single most important innovation in financial markets in the last fifty years. The celebrated Merton, Black & Scholes option pricing formula derived in the 70’s has arguably been the most successful research paper in social sciences. The formula has been widely adopted by market participants, and has initiated a new field, Financial Engineering, which occupies researchers in financial institutions and universities throughout the world. The focus of the course is on applied stochastic calculus applied to problems within finance. We will cover the theory of noarbitrage, Brownian motion, Ito integrals and calculus (Ito’s lemma), change of measure (Girsanov’s theorem), and links to partial differential equations (Feynman Kac’s theorem, Kolmogorov equations). We apply the theory to derive many continuous time asset pricing formulas, including the celebrated Black-Scholes formulas for pricing plain-vanilla options. We also discuss equilibrium models in continuous time (Lucas tree economy, Cox Ingersoll Ross economy). More information on the course page. |
| Applications | Please register in advance with the Department Administrator Nicola Donohoe (Nicola.Donohoe (@) hhs.se). The registration deadline is June 16, 2025. |
| Travel Grant | NFN offers Travel Grants for attending PhD students in finance coming from Nordic institutions outside of Sweden. See instructions at the top of the page. NOTE! Please make sure that you send your travel grant application to the NFN office before the office is closed for the summer holidays (June 27 onwards). |
| Topics in Empirical Finance | |
|---|---|
| Organizer | Graduate School of Finance / Aalto University |
| Instructor | David McLean (Georgetown University) |
| Dates | August 13 -15, 2025 |
| Place | Aalto University School of Business, Espoo, Finland |
| Information | This course has two objectives. The first is to familiarize students with a few different areas of empirical research in finance. The second is to help students think more about promising research questions and how to answer them empirically. There is a focus on behavioral topics. We will begin by studying the origins of behavioral finance and a few of the classic papers in this field. We will then move on to cross-sectional returns predictability. The final topic is retail investors and how they make investment decisions. More information on the course page |
| Applications | Please see course website for instructions. The deadline for applications is August 3, 2025. |
| Travel Grant | NFN offers Travel Grants for attending PhD students in finance coming from Nordic institutions outside of Finland. See instructions at the top of the page. |
| Empirical Banking | |
|---|---|
| Organizer | Graduate School of Finance / Aalto University |
| Instructor | Steven Ongena (University of Zurich) |
| Dates | September 15-17, 2025 |
| Place | Aalto University School of Business, Espoo, Finland |
| Information | This course is to introduce the student to scientific literature dealing with the economics and econometrics of banking, both theoretical and empirical. While the focus is squarely on the econometric methods, their anchoring is solidly in theory. More information on the course website. |
| Applications | Please see course website for instructions. The deadline for applications is August 31, 2025. |
| Travel Grant | NFN offers Travel Grants for attending PhD students in finance coming from Nordic institutions outside of Finland. See instructions at the top of the page. |