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.
Past Courses
You can consult a list of past courses here
Forthcoming Courses
| Topics in Financial Intermediation | |
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| Organizer | Swedish House of Finance, Stockholm School of Economics |
| Instructor | Manju Puri (Fuqua School of Business, Duke University) |
| Dates | June 3-4 & 9, 2025 |
| Place | Stockholm School of Economics, Stockholm, Sweden |
| Information | More information will be updated on the course page. |
| Applications | Please register in advance with the Department Administrator Nicola Donohoe (Nicola.Donohoe (@) hhs.se). The registration deadline is May 20, 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. |
| Modelling Risky Financial Institutions | |
|---|---|
| Organizer | University of Jyväskylä (in collaboration with the Graduate School of Finance) |
| Instructor | David Martinez-Miera (University Carlos III de Madrid) |
| Dates | June 9-13, 2025 |
| Place | University of Jyväskylä, Jyväskylä, Finland |
| Information | The main objective of this course is to understand the key mechanisms underlying the risk-taking behavior of banks and their consequences for the real economy. The course present different setups that allow the participant to better understand: 1. The relevance of imperfect information in the credit market 2. The role of financial institutions in the economy 3. Banks’ risk strategies and their impact on the overall allocation of capital in the economy 4. The role of banks and other agents in determining the inherent instability of the economy 5. The logic and possible unintended consequences underlying banking regulation More information on the course page |
| Applications | Please see course website for instructions. The deadline for applications is May 25, 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. |
| Boosting Empirics with Theory | |
|---|---|
| Organizer | Norwegian School of Economics |
| Instructor | Wolf Wagner (Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University) |
| Dates | June 10-13, 2025 |
| Place | Norwegian School of Economics, Bergen, Norway |
| Information | Methodology courses typically focus on either theory or on the empirical estimation. This course aims to bridge the gap between the two by exploring several ways in which empirical studies can benefit from using theory. We will demonstrate that using theory can often be a low-hurdle approach to improving empirical exercises. Without requiring the collection of new data, theory can help overcome identification challenges, sharpen the empirical specification, derive policy implications, or supplement regressions with additional quantitative exercises. Using theory can take, for instance, the form of explicitly linking the empirics to prior theoretical work, or adding a theoretical framework (even just a single equation) to the paper. We will discuss these possibilities in the context of actual research papers. In doing so, we will also pay attention to their evolution. Several of these papers began as purely empirical studies but later theory was added to overcome specific challenges and enrich the analysis. More information on the course page |
| Applications | Interested students should contact Elizaveta Sizova (Elizaveta.Sizova(@)nhh.no) and Konrad Raff (Konrad.Raff(@)nhh.no. Please note that participants should have completed a PhD-level course in financial econometrics. |
| Travel Grant | NFN offers Travel Grants for attending PhD students in finance coming from Nordic institutions outside of Norway. See instructions at the top of the page. |
| Behavioral Finance | |
|---|---|
| Organizer | Swedish House of Finance, Stockholm School of Economics |
| Instructor | Nicholas Barberis (Yale University) |
| Dates | June 11-18, 2025 |
| Place | Stockholm School of Economics, Stockholm, Sweden |
| Information | The goal of behavioral finance is to make sense of important financial phenomena by improving the psychological realism of our models – in particular, by making more realistic assumptions about people’s beliefs, their risk attitudes, and their cognitive limits more generally. This course will cover the classic contributions to the field, but also the most recent developments and debates. We will consider applications to asset prices (stock market fluctuations, the performance of investment strategies, bubbles); investor behavior; and corporate finance. A recurring theme in the course is that behavioral finance ideas play a key role in many financial phenomena, and that a full understanding of the financial world is impossible without some knowledge of behavioral finance. 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 May 27, 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. |
| 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 | More information will be updated on the course website later. |
| 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. |