September 24th, 2015, 2:37 am
Viewed through a traditional career lens, i.e. money, prestige, job security, etc., it would seem that a traditional finance PhD would trump a math finance PhD any day. Viewed up close, though, there are subtle differences that may work the other way, depending (I think) heavily on the level you get to play at. Teaching is almost certainly more rewarding (from an intellectual perspective, given your background) on the math side of town. While finance PhDs are fair game for all sorts of abuse, you really don't want to try to put calculus in front of an MBA class, which can be fairly limiting. They are the paying customers, and they know it... Perhaps counterintuitively, undergrad business students have a bit more tolerance for math, but they are not usually very good at it. Research, at the highest end (Stanford, Berkeley, MIT, Chicago, and a handful of others) isn't all that different. Really deep and important insights are valued, whether published in Econometrica or the JFE, even if the math level means that any regular finance professor is unable to comprehend it. In the next level of the pecking order it is different: there are probably a couple of hundred business schools that consider themselves just outside the top 10 (or twenty if pushed) who will be very insistent that you get 4-6 papers published in a very short list of journals (JFE, JF, RFS, and maybe JFQA) to qualify for tenure in the finance department. Once you get to the third (or fourth, or whatever) tier, they may in fact be very accepting of any and all publications, including in math finance journals. While the mainstream finance journals have a relatively high tolerance for math content, they are much more likely than the math finance journals to insist on empirical content, which tends to involve hard work (preferably done by RAs) but often also requires funding to get your hands on the data in the first place.
Last edited by
bearish on September 23rd, 2015, 10:00 pm, edited 1 time in total.