Seminar in Finance
SEMINAR IN FINANCE
Course History
The introduction of Seminar in Finance course in MS degree here at IMSciences has an interesting history. A group of MS students asked me about a course that can help them in their MS degree as well as professionally. At that time I suggested this course. Their next question was, "will you take this course with us?" Since then, I have been taking this course. Given the nature of this course, I try to update its contents, method of delivery, and assignments.
What is This Course About?
There is a lot we can do in this course. So far, the previous batches of MS have done the following:
Discussion on seminal papers in the key areas of finance, which include but are not limited to, corporate finance, asset pricing, market efficiency, investment and portfolio decisions, and behavioral finance.
Students actively participate in the class discussion. There are cold- and warm-calls during the discussion. A cold-call is to ask a student about a concept from the paper. Warm-call is to invite anyone to express opinion about a concept or theory. Active participation carries weight in the final grades of the students.
Course incharge intervenes in the discussion if sophisticated or technical terms have to be explained. Also, course incharge explains statistical methods and variable construction in technical papers
Students also write summaries of the papers which are assigned to them weekly. Students submit the summary before they sit in the class. This helps them in preparation for the class discussion. Guidelines for summary write-up can be accessed from the menus given above.
Finally, students replicate one of the empirical paper to understand variable construction and statistical techniques in finance.
Learning Outcomes
Seminar in Finance course is expected to result in the following learning outcomes:
Understand fundamental theories that have shaped the finance discipline over the last century
Understand and practice variable construction process and some of the widely used models in empirical finance
Enhance research report writing skills
Learn data handling in MS Excel
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