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, data sets and technology to traditional problems in finance and economics.

Our programming engages academic, industry, regulatory and student participation.  Some examples of recent events and conferences are here.