The finance program is designed for students interested in financial markets, investments, corporate financing practices, and the pricing of financial instruments. It is targeted towards students with strong backgrounds in finance and economics although previous studies in statistics, or quantitative methods may also be beneficial.

Graduate courses are offered in:

Finance Theory
Corporate Finance
Advanced Asset Pricing
Financial Economics
Empirical Studies

Working closely with a faculty advisor, you make use of the skills acquired throughout your course work to design and pursue your dissertation research. The research may be either theoretical or empirical but in either case will contribute new insights for both researchers and practitioners in the field of finance. Research interests of current faculty members are diverse. They include: investments and portfolio management, financial markets, international finance, risk management, asset pricing, corporate governance, derivatives, and corporate finance.

Learn more about our professors’ research areas here

Sean Cleary is BMO Professor of Finance at Queen’s School of Business. Dr. Cleary has published numerous articles in the Journal of Finance, the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, the Journal of Banking and Finance, the Journal of Multinational Financial Management, the Journal of Financial Research, the International Journal of Managerial Finance, the Canadian Investment Review, and the Canadian Journal of Administrative Sciences. He has received numerous research grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC. He is co-author (with Laurence Booth) of Introduction to Corporate Finance (Wiley & Sons Canada, 2007), as well as numerous other finance textbooks.

Alfred Davis’s research concentrates on empirical investigations of corporate finance issues, particularly in the areas of capital structure, dividend policy, and corporate restructuring. He is currently engaged in studies that examine parent company stock price reaction to the announcement of a spin-off by the parent, and the stock return performance of firms that have emerged from bankruptcy protection. Other research interests include initial public offers as part of an exit strategy by owners, and reverse leverage buyouts.

Louis Gagnon’s research interests lie at the intersection of international corporate finance, investments, and risk management. His current research examines factors hindering arbitrage activity in the market for cross-listed securities and their implications for capital market integration, the dynamic relation between trading volume and market co-movements, and the interaction between corporate investment, financing, and risk management decisions.

Lew Johnson’s research interests focus on investments and portfolio management and on financial system governance and regulation. He has written numerous theoretical and empirical papers on stock and bond valuation, duration analysis, investor behaviour, mutual fund performance, and financial system organization. Recent work has centred on the valuation of technology stocks, in which he has conducted several empirical and theoretical analyses of the technology stock bubble, employing contingent claims and real options theories.

Frank Milne’s research involves two areas: theoretical issues in asset pricing, trading and financial intermediation when there are frictions of various types; and exploring theories of the firm, and considering the implications for a firm’s interactions in financial, commodity, labour, and service markets.

Fabio Moneta’s research interests concentrate on investments and empirical asset pricing with a focus on fixed-income markets. In particular, recent studies include the measurement of performance of bond mutual founds and the bond risk premium. He is also interested in monetary policy topics to which he has exposed while working at the European Central Bank in Frankfurt. He has published articles in forecasting and international business cycle synchronization.

Ted Neave’s research focuses on both theoretical and practical finance. On the theoretical side, he studies financial economics and asset pricing, especially options pricing. On the practical side he analyzes financial systems and financial regulation. He has reported both his theoretical and his practical work in numerous articles and books. In addition, his programs in banking education are currently used in more than forty countries

Lynnette Purda conducts empirical research in corporate finance. She is primarily interested in corporate borrowing and financial institutions operating in the fixed income markets. The combination of these interests has led to her focus on credit rating agencies. She is currently examining the information content of credit ratings and the extent to which firms alter their corporate financing practices in order to secure stronger ratings.

Fatma Sonmez-Saryal’s main research interests are in empirical asset pricing with a primary focus on stock market volatility and how it affects security prices. Her recent research has looked at the impact of share price and institutional trading on volatility. She has presented her research at a variety of academic conferences around the world and won several best paper awards. She also has an active research interest in the impact of stock market participation and population aging on financial markets. She mainly teaches investments and empirical finance courses.

Wulin Suo’s research focuses on valuation and hedging of derivative securities, particularly instruments involving the term structure of interest rates. His research interests also include risk management, credit risk modeling, computational finance, and mathematical finance. He is currently working on problems related to the performance of various derivative pricing models and the application of option pricing theory to other areas of finance.

Selim Topaloglu’s research focuses on trading behaviour of individuals and institutions, analyst behaviour, insider trading and initial public offerings. Current research topics include: the effects of regulation fair disclosure on institutional and insider trading, the secondary market activity for NASDAQ IPOs, and investor behaviour over the rise and fall of the NASDAQ stock market.