Finance PhD

[DeWolve]

Two Questions:

(1) What Finance Programs are known to be less quantitative and which more?

(2) What schools are best in Corporate Finance?

[zshfryoh1]

Here are your answers

(1) If by less quantitative you mean "I will never have to touch math beyond taking simple derivatives and integrals, and my stats will not require me to touch linear algebra" then no such finance program exists that is good enough to be worth going to. No matter where you go you will have to take the core metrics and finance sequence and often the micro sequence. Some people think corp finance is not quantitative, but it is. Modern corp finance has become very mathematical. All decent finance programs in this day are "more quantitative" to a great extent.

(2) I don't know of any corp finance specific rankings, but look at one of the more general finance rankings to see what schools are ranked where and then see which schools in your target range have well published faculty in corp finance.

[DeWolve]

Sorry I misplaced my words.

I know that each "good" program is quant to an extent but relative to each other some fields are less quant (you could take 2 of the most quant fields and relative to each other one is less quant).

I have the background so I am not worried about it but I just prefer less quant meaning, I know corp finance can be quant and heavily statistics based but I know asset pricing is a lot more quant and not for me.

I am not saying I want a 2+2 = 4 program, or fields, but rather I would not want to go much beyond Calc I-III, Linear Alg, and Probability and Statistics after my coursework (i.e. no heavy proof based stuff).

I am looking for fields more than programs but will take both

[zshfryoh1]

Now that you have clarified what you meant I can give a more precise answer. Behavioral finance is an obvious field. Some financial market structure/microstructure research is done by experimental economists. As to corp finance, corp finance theory used to be far less mathematical, but in recent years the use of game theory and various stochastic approaches have become more popular, though empirical corp finance is still pretty much all statistical. In past couple of years more finance people have started doing corporate governance stuff which can be less quantitative. Some financial market structure and microstructure types have begun using agent-based modeling though you need a good programming background for that and there are very few people doing that type of research and they are very spread out, so it would be hard to find a thesis adviser.

[imran626]

Look for schools which are into empirical finance.....You would encounter lot of economterics stuff but you can avoid the highly mathematical area of asset pricing.

Behavioral Finance is also a good non-heavy math area but very few schools offer speciliazations in it.

[DeWolve]

What schools are known to be empirical finance?

[JosephKeith72]

Figure out the range of schools you're going to apply to. Then just look through the faculty directories to see the departments' strengths. It should be pretty obvious whether the group has strengths in asset pricing, corporate finance, or both.