Courses
Courses and workshops organized within the NFN are open to finance PhD students and faculty from all Nordic universities or business schools irrespective of whether their home institution is a member of the NFN.
NFN Travel Grant
The NFN offers Travel Grants for attending PhD students in finance coming from Nordic institutions outside of the country where a given course takes place. To apply for the Travel Grant, please use the form below and send it to the NFN office at nfn (@) aalto.fi. Remember to ask your supervisor to also send a short recommendation email. Please send the application well in advance to make sure that the NFN office has time to process your application and you have a chance to ensure the cheapest tickets available.
Past Courses
You can consult a list of past courses here
Forthcoming Courses
| Topics in Household Finance | |
|---|---|
| Organizer | Lund University |
| Instructor | Kaveh Majlesi (Monash Business School) |
| Dates | November 2-6, 2026 |
| Place | Lund University, Lund, Sweden |
| Information | This course provides a graduate-level introduction to the field of Household Finance. Rather than attempting to offer an exhaustive overview of the literature, the course uses ten 90-minute sessions to explore selected topics in depth. These include the determinants and consequences of households’ wealth allocation, with particular emphasis on participation in and investment in risky assets, as well as household consumption and borrowing decisions. The course is designed to develop students’ ability to read and critically evaluate the academic literature and, ultimately, to use it as a basis for developing new ideas for their own research. Course syllabus |
| Applications | Please register with the course administrator asli.kilicaslan(@)nek.lu.se. |
| Travel Grant | NFN offers Travel Grants for attending PhD students in finance coming from Nordic institutions outside of Sweden. See instructions at the top of the page. |
| Empirical Corporate Finance | |
|---|---|
| Organizer | Graduate School of Finance / Aalto University |
| Instructor | Renée Adams (Saïd Business School, University of Oxford) |
| Dates | May 10-14, 2027 |
| Place | Aalto University School of Business, Espoo, Finland |
| Information | This course offers a doctoral level introduction to Empirical Corporate Finance and aims to prepare doctoral students to do research on their own in this field. |
| Applications | TBA |
| Travel Grant | NFN offers Travel Grants for attending PhD students in finance coming from Nordic institutions outside of Finland. See instructions at the top of the page. |
| PhD Mini-Course on Private Credit Markets | |
|---|---|
| Organizer | Graduate School of Finance / Aalto University |
| Instructor | Sascha Steffen (Frankfurt School of Finance & Management) |
| Dates | Spring/early summer 2027 – exact dates tba |
| Place | Aalto University School of Business, Espoo, Finland |
| Information | Private credit has moved from a niche corner of the loan market to a core segment of corporate finance that now competes directly with banks and the syndicated loan market. The course asks three questions in turn. First, why these lenders exist: what theory and evidence say about which borrowers are financed by banks, by public markets, and by private funds, and how that boundary moved after the post-crisis reforms. Second, what is inside the contract and what we can actually measure: loan terms, monitoring and renegotiation, PIK and amendments, and the valuation, ratings and performance-measurement problems that arise when the asset has no market price. Third, how fragility is private credit? Private credit funds are themselves levered, so we turn to their liability side, i.e. bank credit lines, securitizations, unsecured bonds and redeemable retail equity, and to what this implies for rollover and run risk, bank–nonbank interconnectedness, and the policy debate at the ESRB, FSB and IMF. Throughout, the course is organized around the data: what BDC filings, fund-level and loan-level datasets can and cannot identify, and which open questions are ready to be written. |
| Applications | TBA |
| Travel Grant | NFN offers Travel Grants for attending PhD students in finance coming from Nordic institutions outside of Finland. See instructions at the top of the page. |
| Summer School Market Microstructure | |
|---|---|
| Organizer | Stockholm Business School |
| Instructor | Thierry Foucault (HEC Paris) & Albert J. Menkveld (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) |
| Dates | June 14-18, 2027 |
| Place | Stockholm Business School, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden |
| Information | The course aims to acquaint students with the field of market microstructure, both theoretically and empirically. Market microstructure has grown rapidly as an important subfield of finance. Research in this field focuses on the intertwined relationships between volatility, liquidity, price discovery, market design, and ultimately welfare. Models in market microstructure provide a framework for the analysis of price movements and trading volume. After the course students will be aware of canonical models in microstructure and how they can be adapted to study the effects of recent changes in market structures and trading technologies (e.g., high frequency trading or AI). They will also learn what the appropriate econometric models are to test the predictions of microstructure models, when and why particular models should be used for data analysis, and understand their relative advantages and drawbacks. More information on the course page |
| Applications | Please apply through the course page. The deadline for applications is December 1, 2026. The course fee is waived for NFN students. |
| Travel Grant | NFN offers Travel Grants for attending PhD students in finance coming from Nordic institutions outside of Sweden. See instructions at the top of the page. |
| The Financial Economics of Entrepreneurship, Private Equity and Venture Capital | |
|---|---|
| Organizer | Graduate School of Finance / Aalto University |
| Instructor | David Robinson (Duke University) |
| Dates | August 23-27, 2027 |
| Place | Aalto University School of Business, Espoo, Finland |
| Information | This course is designed to provide a deep, fast-paced dive into the emerging field of entrepreneurial finance. We will cover both classic papers as well as new work. The ultimate objective of the course is to prepare advanced graduate students for research in this rapidly growing sector. More information TBA |
| Applications | TBA |
| Travel Grant | NFN offers Travel Grants for attending PhD students in finance coming from Nordic institutions outside of Finland. See instructions at the top of the page. |