The Dissertation is a two-stage process. In the first stage, all students will attend i) a 5 hours lecture on introduction to dissertation in finance and ii) a 10 hours workshop. The lecture and the workshop will be held during the second semester. The lecture will focus on research design, guiding students to pursue academic readings, conduct literature reviews, develop research ideas, highlight related ethical issues and understand broad suits of methodologies available for data analysis. The workshop will supplement the lecture, familiarising students with the available data sources at the Birmingham Business School’s access to Bloomberg, WRDS, ORBIS Bankfocus, COMPUSTAT, CRSP, Datastream, etc, provide practical guidance to data collection and data analysis using Stata. At the end of second semester, students are required to submit and present a thorough research proposal, which will be evaluate by the supervisors as pass or fail (in that case the students requires to re-submit the proposal). In the second stage over the summer term, students will work with their assigned supervisors to develop their research proposal into a full project report for further assessment (100%). There will be five scheduled supervision meetings of 1 hour each before students submit their final work. During these meetings the supervisor will provide them with feedback on how to improve their work. In one of the supervision sessions, students will orally present their work, using power point presentation or alike. Students will also receive feedback on their presentation skills.
Learning Outcomes
By the end of the module students should be able to:
Assess and critically review the literature relevant to theoretical and applied research across a range of core finance-related subjects such as corporate finance, investment, asset pricing, innovation, sustainability, entrepreneurship, banking and financial markets.
Design a convincing motivation for a programme of research on their topic of interest, leading to the development of a research idea with clear testable hypothesis.
Apply competence and skills in using a range of financial databases, such as Bloomberg and DataStream as well as for collecting primary data, when necessary, leading to the development of a research idea with a clear testable hypothesis.
Critically apply knowledge of a broad suits of methodologies available for data analysis.
Effectively communicate research findings through their dissertation.
Assessment
Assessment Methods & Exceptions
Assessment: A 15,000 words individual dissertation (100%)
Reassessment: Resubmission of the dissertation (100%)
