Ph.D. Program

Overview

The finance Ph.D. program seeks to train world class academic researchers. The program offers an in-depth learning environment, close student-faculty interaction, exposure to different areas in the field of finance, and access to state-of-the-art computer software and financial data. Recent graduates have leveraged the breadth of our faculty’s research interests to study questions relating to corporate finance, the pricing of debt, equity, and derivatives, municipal financing, cryptocurrencies, and decentralized finance. Professor Matt Gustafson has been director of the Ph.D. Program since 2022.

Spotlights

Alumni: Zihan Ye

Zihan Ye came to Penn State after completing her master’s degree at Oxford University and graduated from our doctoral program in 2020. After initially placing at UNLV, she is now an assistant professor of finance at the University of Tennessee. Zihan is an empiricist conducting research in the areas of municipal finance and healthcare finance. Using the $4 trillion dollar U.S. municipal bond market as a research laboratory, her current work focuses on the effects of health factors on public financing costs and the local economy. Her research has been published in the Review of Financial Studies and has been presented at high-quality finance conferences, including the American Finance Association Annual Meeting and the Financial Research Association Conference.

Current student: Qiang Wang

Qiang is starting her fifth year as a doctoral student with the goal of becoming a tenure track faculty member at a research university. Her dissertation studies a blockchain-based lending model, while her broader research agenda touches on a wide range of topics in areas such as cryptocurrency assets, blockchain technology, and student loans. Qiang’s work has been invited for presentation at several major conferences including INFORMS, the Boulder Summer Conference on Consumer Financial Decision Making, and the Western Finance Association, which is arguably the most exclusive large finance conference with a 6.8% acceptance rate. Before joining Penn State, Qiang served as a natural language processing data analyst intern for non-profit organizations and completed her M.S. in Business Analytics from George Washington University and her B.A. in Food Science from Zhejiang University.

Ph.D. Student Placements

Historically, we have graduated over 75% of our Ph.D. students in five years or less with the majority placing into tenure track jobs at U.S. research institutions. View a complete list of our placements here.

Our placements over the past three years are:

Terrence O’Brien (2023, University of Maryland)

Essays on Cryptocurrency Exchange Volume Manipulation and Volatility

Doctoral Committee: Charles Cao (Chair), Mehmet Canayaz, David Haushalter

Lu Yang (2023, Analysis Group)

Essays on information processing in the capital markets

Doctoral Committee: Alexey Zhdanov (Chair), Tim Simin, Charles Cao, Mihail Velikov

Han Xiao (2023, The Chinese University of Hong Kong)

Essays on Fund Management

Doctoral Committee: Charles Cao (Chair), Matthew Gustafson, Mihail Velikov

Luis Ceballos (2022, University of San Diego)

Essays on Bond Markets

Doctoral Committee:  Jingzhi Huang (Chair), Anh Le, Timothy Simin, Joel Vanden

Brian Gibbons (2021, Oregon State University)

Essays on Corporate Finance and Disclosure

Doctoral Committee: Peter Iliev (Chair), Timothy Simin, Jess Cornaggia, Kimberly Cornaggia, Matthew Gustafson, Stefan Lewellen

Stephen Owens (2021, University of North Texas)

Essays on Conditional Asset Pricing and Machine Learning in Finance

Doctoral Committee: Timothy Simin (co-chair), Charles Cao (co-chair), Stephen Lenkey, Giang Nguyen, Alexey Zhdanov

Entering Students

We are very excited to have two fantastic incoming students for the fall of 2024 out of the approximately 90 applications:

Zhengang Zhang is a 2015 graduate from the University of Indiana with a BS in Math and Finance. He then completed a master’s from Georgia Tech in Quantitative and Computational Finance in 2016 before most recently working as Director of Investments at Everbright PGIM Asset Management.

Zhanqi Kong obtained her BS in Finance from Shandong University in 2022 and her MS in Business Analytics from Washington University in St. Louis in 2023. She has extensive course and research experience with machine learning techniques and research interests in asset pricing.