Empirical Methods in Financial Economics

The goal of this course is to provide a rigorous, PhD-level introduction to the modern empirical toolkit that is used in corporate finance and empirical macro finance. The course shows how to apply these empirical methodologies to answer research questions in financial economics. We will frequently use the literatures on (i) credit supply shocks, (ii) investment cash flow sensitivity, and (iii) corporate market-timing as settings for building a deeper understanding of these tools. However, examples from other empirical finance and macro literatures will also be covered.