Another Win for UP Business ~ Publishable Papers
BUS 539. Research Methods in Finance.
Taught by University of Portland School of Business Finance professor, Dr. Arjun Chatrath teaches this advanced class that focuses on empirical analysis of financial and economic data. The objective of the course is to produce publishable papers for attendees. The first few weeks relate to:
- Asking meaningful questions.
- Interpreting data. Econometric techniques (using Shazam software)
- What research entails – writing research reports
Students then develop ideas, collect data, and work towards their research goals.
Student Papers
In the Spring 2025 semester, students worked on the following papers:
- Francesca Faustina examines how shocks in the price of rice impacts nonfood inflation in the Philippines. The idea is to examine the importance of singular commodities in economic outcomes for many developing economies.
- Yuchun Kuo, Hao Vu, Samuel Kulluraman, and Kaina Guerrero examine whether the growth of shadow banking has been especially hard on small banks, which predominantly have undiversified loan portfolios. They compare the return on assets and delinquency rates on small and large banks in the face of competition from nonbank financial institutions.
- Emme Shearer and Maisie Burnham examine how Economic Policy Uncertainty (EPU) is a proxy of ambiguity risk in that normal volatility measures (VIX, MOVE, crude VIX, etc) provide false signals when EPU is high.
- Nolan Hosbein, Henry Muench, et al., examine whether fintech companies Granger Cause (lead) small business problems.
The class requires some background in statistics and a laptop (not IOS) or pc.
Learn More
To learn more about this course, contact Dr. Arjun Chatrath at – chatrath@up.edu