Depending on one’s personal preferences, the programme’s courses and electives present an excellent way to get acquainted with a variety of topics that are essential for Financial Economics. The Master’s specialisation consists of core courses, electives, seminars, and a Master’s thesis distributed over five blocks of eight weeks.
Core courses and electives help you to get acquainted with a wide range of topics that are essential for financial economics, and provide you with a solid background for attending the seminars. Seminars are the most important component of the Master’s specialisation. For these intensive courses, active participation and commitment is a prerequisite. You are expected to present excerpts of literature or case applications, ask questions, express doubts, and share your ideas in class discussions.
The specialisation allows you to select from seminars in corporate finance, financial innovation, and investments. The last block of the specialisation is devoted to the Master’s thesis. The thesis is written individually under close supervision by one of our academic staff members.
Curriculum
The curriculum consists of three tracks:
- 33% Corporate Finance
- 33% Investment
- 33% Financial Innovation
In Class
A case example: How do you decide on a company acquisition? How should you value a company? Making optimal decisions requires understanding of the firm’s strategy, business model, the competition in the industry, and the expected operating cash flows. It also forces you to make decisions on the financing of the deal. Is financing with a significant amount of debt an option? And what would be the preferred bidding strategy? In an actual case, you study these aspects together with comments of experienced private equity investors and investment bankers, and devise an optimal strategy, which you could advise in real life.
Study schedule
The Take-Off is the introduction event for all new students of Erasmus School of Economics. During this interesting introduction event, you will be provided with useful practical information and receive an introduction to your studies, meet your fellow students and our School.
Students choose six of the listed courses (24 ec) or five of the listed courses (20 ec) and one other Economics and Business master’s course (4 ec), with the exception of the core courses from the specialisation Data Science and Marketing Analytics.
In addition, students are advised to follow the "Workshop on Sustainable Finance and Business Ethics" (0 ec).
- Advanced Corporate Finance and Strategy
- Asset Pricing
- Advanced Money, Credit and Banking
- Advanced Investments
- Advanced Corporate Finance and Governance
- Blockchain Technology and Cryptocurrencies
- Financial Risk Management
- Advanced Behavioural Finance
- Fixed Income Securities and Portfolio Management
- International Finance
- Empirical Methods for Finance
Students choose two seminars (20 ec) from the listed seminars:
- Seminar Advanced Investments
- Seminar Behavioural Investing
- Seminar Four Centuries of Finance
- Seminar Data Science in Finance
- Seminar Advanced Corporate Finance: Private Equity
- Seminar Risk Management
- Seminar Advanced Corporate Finance: Empirical Corporate Finance
- Seminar Advanced Corporate Finance: Corporate Governance
- Seminar Advanced Money, Credit and Banking
- Seminar Finance for Sustainability
- Seminar Behavioural Finance
- Seminar Institutional Asset Management
- Seminar Topics in FinTech
- Seminar Commodity Trading
- Seminar International Financial Markets
The thesis is an individual assignment about a subject from your Master's specialisation. More information about thesis subjects, thesis supervisors and the writing process can be found on the Master thesis website.
Disclaimer
The overview above provides an impression of the curriculum for this programme for the academic year 2025-2026. It is not an up-to-date study schedule for current students. They can find their full study schedules on MyEUR. Please note that minor changes to this schedule are possible in future academic years.