Prospective PhD Students

Prospective PhD students

 

The number of PhD students I can take on is very limited. If you are interested in studying a PhD with me, please read on.

 

 

A typical application process for a PhD

 

A PhD student typically has two supervisors (a primary supervisor and a co-supervisor). Before you apply formally to the school PhD office, you need to first identify a potential primary supervisor and contact them to express your interest to do a PhD under their supervision. When contacting the potential primary supervisor, you should attach a research proposal, detailed CV, and transcript to your email.

 

The potential primary supervisor will find a colleague with similar research interests to be the potential co-supervisor and then arrange an informal meeting with you. At the meeting, you will be asked various questions about your research motivation, academic background, research experiences, knowledge about the relevant literature, funding situation, etc. After the meeting, the potential supervisors will discuss with each other and then notify you on whether they are willing to be your supervisors. If the answer is yes, you may then make the formal application to the PhD office, putting the names of the two supervisors in the relevant sections of the application form. The PhD office will organise formal interview(s) to assess your suitability for the PhD programme (the assessor(s) are unlikely to be the supervisor(s) you have mentioned on the application form).

 


Fees and fundings

 

The fee information of a PhD programme at Soton can be found here: https://www.southampton.ac.uk/business-school/postgraduate/research_degrees/courses/phd.page#fees_%26amp%3B_funding

 

There is a very limited number of PhD scholarships at the Business School that are offered on a competitive basis. You may also want to check out scholarships provided by the U.K. or your home country. More information about scholarship can be found here:

https://www.southampton.ac.uk/study/fees-funding/scholarships/partnerships-awards

 

Some students may have to self-fund their PhD studies.

 

 

Research themes

 

You should look up my research profile and publications to get a feeling about my past and current research interests. In general, I am a corporate-finance researcher and my research typically employs a firm-year or firm-month panel dataset.

 

Currently, I am looking for PhD students under the following two themes:

 


Theme #1

The application of novel computing/programming techniques to accounting and finance problems

 

Examples of techniques include, e.g., machine learning, textual analysis, audio analysis, web crawling, etc. These techniques will be applied to, e.g., corporate public documents, reports, conference transcripts, websites, glassdoor, social media, Linkedin, job postings, etc. The focus of this research theme will be to construct/gather new datasets or empirical measures that can be subsequently analysed and studied to address important questions in accounting, finance, and economics.

 

Examples of related research:


Li, K., Mai, F., Shen, R., Yan, X., 2021. Measuring Corporate Culture Using Machine Learning, The Review of Financial Studies, 34(7), 3265–3315.

 

Sautner, Z., Van Lent, L., Vilkov, G. and Zhang, R., 2023. Firm-Level Climate Change Exposure. The Journal of Finance, 78, 1449-1498.

 

Bartov, E., Faurel, L., Mohanram, P., 2023. The Role of Social Media in the Corporate Bond Market: Evidence from Twitter. Management Science, 69(9), 5638-5667.

 

 

Theme #2

The effect of reforms/changes/trends in financial markets, economic policies, and/or political systems on corporate outcomes and policies

 

Examples of such reforms/changes/trends include those in, e.g., market microstructure, trading systems, monetary policies, financial products (e.g., ETFs), diversity quotas, climate and ESG legislations, labor protection, taxation regimes, competitive regimes, etc. The aim of this research theme is to identify novel empirical settings and datasets to study important questions in accounting, finance, and economics.

 

Examples of related research:


Gao, H., Hsu, P.H., Zhang, J., 2023. Pay Transparency and Inventor Productivity: Evidence from State-level Pay Secrecy Laws. RAND Journal of  Economics, forthcoming.

 

Ben-David, I., Franzoni, F., Moussawi, R., 2018. Do ETFs Increase Volatility? The Journal of Finance, 73, 2471-2535.

 

Iliev, P., Roth, L., 2023. Director Expertise and Corporate Sustainability. Review of Finance, 27(6), 2085–2123.

 

 

Who you are:

 

 

 

Contact me

 

If you are interested in embarking on a PhD journey with me at Southampton Business School, please think of a research idea based on either one of the above two themes and contact me along with (1) a research proposal (not necessarily a fully completed proposal; can be a work-in-progress that can be further developed), (2) detailed CV, and (3) transcript.

 

The research proposal of your chosen topic (max. 1,500 words) should include the following sections:

 

After our email exchanges and informal meeting(s), you are likely to be asked to amend/modify/extend/revise your research proposal.  


For more information about our PhD programme, please check out:

https://www.southampton.ac.uk/business-school/postgraduate/research_degrees/courses/phd.page