Seminar in Empirical Finance (2025/26)
Coordinator
Language
English
Credits
6 ECTS
Application Requirements & Rules for Registration and Withdrawal from
the Seminar
- A preliminary registration at the Chair of Statistics and Econometrics is required!
- For the preliminary registration, please fill in the formulary and send it together with your transcript of records to Conny Hupfer until 22 September 2025 at the latest.
- On 30 September 2025 we will inform by email the students who can take part in the seminar.
- The first meeting will take place on Monday, 13 October at 2:15 p.m. in room 201, Breisacher Tor, Rempartstr. 4, 2nd floor. In this meeting, we will present you the exact topics you can choose from for the seminar.
- Students will have time until 20 October 2025 to find a partner and choose a topic or to withdraw from the seminar. If you withdraw from the seminar after this deadline you will receive the grade 5.0.
Meetings
First meeting:
- Monday, 13 October, at 2:15 p.m. in room 201, Breisacher Tor
Presentation meetings:
- The presentations will take place on March 16, 2026 in seminar room 01012, Rempartstr. 16, 1st floor.
Qualification Target
The goal of this seminar is to acquaint master students with modern econometric methods and their applications to research questions related to financial econometrics, quantitative risk management, high-dimensional and high-frequency finance as well as machine learning in empirical finance.
Contents
The seminar addresses mainly topics in applied financial econometrics. The topics vary each year.
On each topic, students (single or in a group of two) have to write a term paper, in which they apply a novel and/or advanced econometric method to solve real economic problems by undergoing a complex empirical analysis on real (usually big) financial data and by self-programming the codes for the empirical study. The topics can be individually adapted to allow for being pursued further in a subsequent master thesis.
Requirements
- Successful completion of the classes Intermediate Econometrics
- Good knowledge in a programming language (R, Python, Matlab, etc.)
- Parallel enrollment or the successful completion of Financial Time Series Analysis or any other econometrics related class
- (On demand, we also could provide the videos of the lectures “Financial Econometrics“, “Time Series Analysis“, and “Advanced Topics in Econometrics” from the COVID time period.)
It is highly recommended and desired that two students work on a topic jointly.
Literature
The list of literature is provided for each topic during the first meeting at the beginning of the semester.
Examination Type
- Term paper (to be submitted one week before the presentation sessions)
- Classroom presentation of the term paper
Target Group
The course can be chosen as an elective 6 ECTS course in:
- M.Sc. BWL (Volkswirtschaftslehre / Quantitative Methoden / Wirtschaftsinformatik)
- M.Sc. VWL (Accounting, Finance and Taxation / Business Analytics / Constitutional Economics and Competition Policy / Empirical Economics / Network Economics and IT Risk Management)
- M.Sc. in Economics (Finance / Information Systems and Network Economics / Digital Markets)
Further Information
Further information about the seminar can be found here.