PhD Program
Philosophy
Philosophy
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will be solved by science."
Charles Darwin
The PhD program in finance aims to train innovative scholars, able to produce top-quality research in finance. To achieve this objective, students need to develop deep understanding of contemporaneous finance and related fields, demonstrated through the successful completion of required courses and a comprehensive exam. Further, they need to show their skills in producing original research through a second-year paper and a dissertation.
The second-year paper must be presented in the Finance Department brown bag seminar before the end of the third year in front of the Faculty.
Students are required to participate in the academic activities of the finance department (seminar, brownbag, conferences) and they will have the possibility to cooperate with the faculty both at the Paris and the Singapore campuses.
Subfields
In this concentration, students can specialize in one of the following subfields:
- Asset pricing and investments
- Corporate Finance
- Financial Econometrics
- Market
- Microstructure
- Risk Management
Common courses and seminars
Courses and seminars cover three components
General Requirements
- Applied Statistics
- Macroeconomics
- Microeconomics
Advanced Courses and Seminars – Year 1
- Asset Pricing 1
- Asset Pricing 2
- Corporate Finance 1
- Empirical methods
- Advanced Microeconomics
- Econometrics
- Introduction to Game theory
- Research seminars of the Finance department: Professor seminars and Brownbags
Advanced Courses and Seminars – Year 2
- Asset Pricing 3
- Empirical Corporate Finance
- Microstructure of Financial Markets
- Time Series Analysis
- Introduction to Stochastic Processes
- Microeconometrics
- Research seminars of the Finance department: Professor seminars and Brownbags
Electives : 3 among
- Empirical Corporate Governance
- Quantitative Risk Management in Finance
- Behavioral Finance
- Advanced Corporate Finance
- Advanced Microeconomics
- Introduction to Decision Theory
ESSEC Talk

Yosra, current student, will be more than happy to answer your questions