About

The Program for Financial Studies (PFS) at Columbia Business School is a partnership between academia and industry whose goal is to support and promote the School’s research in financial economics.

Our mandate consists of three parts: to support basic research; to communicate this research to relevant industry and regulatory institutions; and to transfer knowledge gained in this research to our School community. Finance research is interdisciplinary in nature, and our affiliated faculty are drawn from multiple departments at the School, including finance, DRO, accounting and economics.

The dropping cost of computational resources, the extraordinary growth in traditional and nontraditional data sets, and constant technological progress coming from the open-source software community have combined to fundamentally transform research in the social sciences, and in finance in particular. A theme that runs through our research efforts at the PFS is the application of new tools and data sets to traditional problems in finance and economics.

We encourage you to learn more about the program’s initiatives:

The PFS sponsors multiple conferences with a focus on the above research streams. Our conferences engage academic, industry, regulatory and student participation. Some examples of recent events and conferences are here.

Particularly popular at the PFS is our No Free Lunch Seminar series where faculty present short summaries of their research to our students. These talks are recorded and available here.