040014 KU Econometrics in Finance (MA) (2019S)

Recent years have witnessed a growing need for econometric methods in financial research and practice. As a result, financial econometrics has become one of the most active areas of research in econometrics. This is documented by the award of the Nobel Prize 2003 to Robert F. Engle for his contribution to the modelling of time-varying asset return volatility and the award of the 2013 Nobel Prize to Lars Peter Hansen for his pioneering work on the empirical analysis of asset prices.

This course aims to provide students an introduction into the field and an overview of the most important topics and techniques. Having predominantly an applied focus, it attempts to balance between derivations of basic theoretical relations, fundamental methodology, the analysis of specific financial econometric models, applications thereof as well as the discussion of important empirical findings.

The course deals with fundamental time series techniques to model and to predict financial data and with the modeling of time-varying volatility. In this context, the concept of realized volatility as well as the analysis of financial high-frequency data is covered.
More advanced topics include the analysis of panel data and the difference in differences estimation.

An important objective is to provide a comprehensive knowledge to do empirical work in financial research and practice. Therefore, a part of the course consists of practical exercises where students are instructed to apply econometric concepts to real financial data. In this context, students will be introduced to basic programming and application steps using the statistical software package R.