PhD in Finance

The faculty of the Department of Finance, Real Estate, and Insurance and Risk Management at the Carl H. Lindner College of Business represent the following teaching and research interests:

Finance

  • Asset pricing
  • Corporate finance
  • Experimental finance
  • Financial institutions
  • High-frequency trading
  • International finance
  • Investment
  • Market microstructure

Real Estate

  • Housing policy
  • Real estate finance
  • Real estate investment
  • Urban economics

Insurance and Risk Management

  • Castastrophe risk
  • Decision-making under risk
  • Economics of uncertainty
  • Innovations in managing risk
  • Insurance markets
  • Risk literacy
  • Risk management

The department is one of UC's best in terms of student retention, graduation, time-to-degree, and placement, and offers a rigorous, systematic, and highly structured doctoral program that develops quantitative, analytical, and teaching skills required for a successful career as a financial economist or as a faculty member. Our primary objective is to train scholars who will join top academic and research institutions or enter the field of financial economics.

The department has experienced phenomenal growth in the past few years, with exceptionally talented and highly energetic fresh PhDs from Columbia University, Indiana University, London Business School, and the University of Michigan joining our internationally renowned faculty. We work with a select number of PhD candidates each year on a wide range of empirical and theoretical research topics in finance.

Our faculty publications appear in such diverse journals as Geneva Risk, Insurance Review, Journal of Risk and Insurance, Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial Research, Financial Review, Journal of Real Estate Finance & Economics, Quarter Journal of Business and Economics, Journal of International Business Studies, and the Pacific-Basin Finance Journal

Lindner doctoral students receive excellent research support. Our seminar series features prominent researchers. Our department has subscriptions to all major finance and accounting databases through WRDS, and funding is available to doctoral students for travel to conferences. Our top-ranked Carl H. Lindner III Center for Insurance and Risk Management and the UC Real Estate Center provide a great opportunity for doctoral students to interact with practitioners.

A collegial environment has long been a hallmark of the Lindner College of Business PhD programs. Students frequently collaborate with one another and with faculty to produce original research. We strongly encourage these collaborations and place a high priority on students pursuing their own research agendas as quickly as possible. The finance program is highly selective, allowing faculty to work closely with each doctoral student to customize a program of study that meets his or her interests and needs. The goal of this interaction is for you to develop the ability to conduct original research that will become the cornerstone of your dissertation.

In order to enhance our students' teaching abilities, the Lindner College of Business offer teaching workshops to develop their classroom skills. In our program, students are mentored by department faculty while in various teaching assistant roles and they are given hands-on teaching experience in the classroom to complete their teacher training.

The program begins with a thorough grounding in quantitative methods and economic and financial theory and is complemented by a sequence of seminars covering all the major areas of financial economics. Through work on an independent research paper, students develop the skills and ability necessary to conduct original research. Satisfactory performance on a written comprehensive examination marks the transition from coursework to full-time thesis research. A brief list of the research topics students may choose to pursue as a dissertation topic include theoretical, experimental, or empirical aspects of asset pricing, corporate finance, financial institutions, market microstructure, or real estate..

Contact us

Headshot of Hui Guo, PhD

Hui Guo, PhD

Professor, Briggs Swift Cunningham Professorship of Finance, Department of Finance, Real Estate, and Insurance and Risk Management

2360 Carl H. Lindner Hall

513-556-7077