Seminar in Empirical Finance (2025)

Coordinator

Prof. Dr. Roxana Halbleib

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 2 April 2025 at the latest.
• On 7 April 2025 we will inform by email the students who can take part in the seminar.
• The first meeting will take place on 30 April 2025 at 12:15 p.m. in R 01 020a, Hermann-Herder-Str. 9, 1^st floor. In this meeting, we will present you the exact topics you can choose from for the seminar.
• Students will have time until 6 May 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:

• 30 April 2025, 12:15 p.m., R 01 020a, Hermann-Herder-Str. 9, 1^st floor.
  (You need your UniCard to enter the building.)

Presentation meetings:

• The presentations will take place on 17 September 2025 in room 02012 (Rempartstr. 16 2^nd 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.

Basic Requirements

• Successful completion of the classes Intermediate Econometrics
• Good knowledge in a programming language (R, Python, Matlab, etc.)

Recommended Requirements

• Parallel enrollment or the successful completion of Financial Time Series Analysis or any other econometrics related class is highly recommended.
• 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.