I see a couple of universities offer a Ph.D/DPhil degree in Financial Economics, like University of Chicago (joint Finance and Econmics) or University of Oxford, for example.I am just wondering how (much) different it is from Ph.D in Economics or Ph.D in Finance, or if it is merely a combination of the two. How quantitative is it? I guess it is quite hard to explain "how quantitative" in plain words, so how about, say, is it quantitative enough for those quant jobs that advertise one of requirements as "Ph.D in quantitative discipline"?I am sure those Financial Economics programs have been out there for quite some time, but I am just not sure if there is anything different about it from, say, Economics or Finance.

In Chicago, Financial Economics is the Finance PhD program. It is just called Financial Economics. In USA all the Finance PhD students take 70% of their coursework in Economics.Micro-Economics is basically just Calculus (Diff Eq.). Econometrics is basically statistics. Game Theory is similar to Decision Theory / Risk Management. It can be quite quntitative especially modeling incomplete information and bounded rationality and multi-player games.My personal opinion is that Finance and Economics is just as quantitative as a PhD in Physics / Maths / Engineering / Computer Science. There are lot of people who do PhD in Math / Physics / Economics and then do second PhD in Finance. The Finance PhD admission committee will always prefer an Economics PhD or who had completed the first two years of coursework in Economics PhD from a good school as the first preference above all the other candidates.

QuoteOriginally posted by: traderjoe1976In Chicago, Financial Economics is the Finance PhD program. It is just called Financial Economics. In USA all the Finance PhD students take 70% of their coursework in Economics.Micro-Economics is basically just Calculus (Diff Eq.). Econometrics is basically statistics. Game Theory is similar to Decision Theory / Risk Management. It can be quite quntitative especially modeling incomplete information and bounded rationality and multi-player games.My personal opinion is that Finance and Economics is just as quantitative as a PhD in Physics / Maths / Engineering / Computer Science. There are lot of people who do PhD in Math / Physics / Economics and then do second PhD in Finance. The Finance PhD admission committee will always prefer an Economics PhD or who had completed the first two years of coursework in Economics PhD from a good school as the first preference above all the other candidates.Are those microeconomics cousre useful for doing research in financial economics?

If you do not do the courses, you will not be able to read and understand the journal articles. If you do not first read hundreds of journal articles, you cannot do any original research.

QuoteOriginally posted by: traderjoe1976If you do not do the courses, you will not be able to read and understand the journal articles. If you do not first read hundreds of journal articles, you cannot do any original research.Which courses do you refer to? Not all economics courses are necessary to take. Supervisors should tell students which courses are useless and useful.

Well all the Finance PhD students will take Micro I, Micro II, Macro I, Macro II, Econometrics I, II, III, then probably a few more from Game Theory I, II, Statistical Testing using SAS, SPSS, Matlab. Then five Finance seminar courses one in each of the research areas. Maybe some MBA / MFE level Finance courses.The people who come in after switching from Economics PhD will not take Economics courses. They will take more Finance courses at the MBA / MFE level.The people who come in with MBA Finance will take all the Economics courses.The people who come in with MS / PhD in Math Physics will take the Economics and Finance courses as well as the MBA core courses.Some schools admit super-smart 21-year old people fresh from Harvard / MIT / Stanford. Those 21-year old people embarass everyone else in the PhD program because they just sail through it like it is a piece of cake. Working 70 hours a week and being paid $1500 a month means nothing to them because they have no family to support and they perform exceptionally well in the PhD program. I have seen some of these super-smart, 21-year old nerds sail through the PhD program without breaking into a sweat and the older people with better qualifications really struggle.

QuoteOriginally posted by: traderjoe1976Well all the Finance PhD students will take Micro I, Micro II, Macro I, Macro II, Econometrics I, II, III, then probably a few more from Game Theory I, II, Statistical Testing using SAS, SPSS, Matlab. Then five Finance seminar courses one in each of the research areas. Maybe some MBA / MFE level Finance courses.The people who come in after switching from Economics PhD will not take Economics courses. They will take more Finance courses at the MBA / MFE level.The people who come in with MBA Finance will take all the Economics courses.The people who come in with MS / PhD in Math Physics will take the Economics and Finance courses as well as the MBA core courses.Some schools admit super-smart 21-year old people fresh from Harvard / MIT / Stanford. Those 21-year old people embarass everyone else in the PhD program because they just sail through it like it is a piece of cake. Working 70 hours a week and being paid $1500 a month means nothing to them because they have no family to support and they perform exceptionally well in the PhD program. I have seen some of these super-smart, 21-year old nerds sail through the PhD program without breaking into a sweat and the older people with better qualifications really struggle.The people who come in with MMF, what courses will they take?Do you think every course they ask to take is highly related to doing research and publishing high quality papers in top journals?If you can provide us course lines for those you mentioned, we can look into the details. The key should be working with good supervisors. Unfortunately most of good supervisors are in good US schools.

it depends if you go the corporate finance route or the empirical finance route. if you do empirical finance, you simply take 2 full years of stat courses and prob and stats, then you start mining data for your thesis. if you do corporate finance, you have to pick a moot theoretical academic topic.

QuoteOriginally posted by: traderjoe1976. I have seen some of these super-smart, 21-year old nerds sail through the PhD program without breaking into a sweat and the older people with better qualifications really struggle. most of the older people are embarassed and scared shitless that the 21 year old can run circles around them even though the old guys have phds in math or physics. guess who gets the better jobs at graduation? it aint grandpa!