Hi, first of all thanks for reading this. I am a professional and have been working for a few years in consulting firms/insurance companies and thinking to take a break to eventually start a PhD.

My background is a master's degree in Economics (mainly focused on financial mathematics btw), I work as a quant but I do feel that I would like to have a deeper understanding of things I do everyday at work, also basically I would also be interested in an academic careeer even more than a standard a career.

As I really have a passion for most topics related to macroeconomics/econometrics/financial mathematics in general (e.g. diff equations), is there some place where I can check which are the most important topics for research nowadays? or do you have some topics to suggest? to be honest I would prefer to avoid this and find a topic I really "feel" myself, but the lack of time due to work duties obviously does not allow me to do that.

Any advice of any kind is appreciated. Thanks!

Yes, ideally you would find your own topic. As a practical matter, many topics are suggested to students by their PhD advisor. So, one way to start is to pick some schools that offer the PhD you are interested in, and browse the relevant faculty pages to see what they and their students are working on. Another way, assuming you are somewhere near to a major financial center is to attend research talks at the many universities that will be near.      

first of all thanks for the replies. Agree with everything, only concern is that I go and sit down with some professor, and he start asking about some topics rather then to ask for some area of interest (which I would find to be more smart as 1st question)... I had some friends who had bad experiences with this as they were told if you don't already have your proper topic it'd better not to even start a PhD. I don't share this philosophy as being actively working and not having time to "research for the research", I know that there might be many very interesting topics out there that could be deeply analyzed I don't even know they exist. thanks for the help btw