PHD finance thesis

Anyone who can assist me – trying to pursue PHD and I have a broad interest in value investing…but I want to concentrate on small caps. Any thoughts if this is a potential PHD topic….i did my masters long time ago and I have no one to guide me…Any academics out there.I would appreciate your help.

6 Comments
 

I'm an undergrad who works with a lot of the PhD students at my school. Focus and context is paramount to a Finance thesis, and "value investing in small cap stocks" is neither of those.

What is it about small cap stocks that you find interesting? Do they make particularly attractive investment possibilities to value investors? Why is this? Are there other papers out there that explain this? (Hint, yes). My guess is that if you want to stick with this area you'll likely have to refine your argument and pick something very specific.

 

^This. First, glad you have an area that you are passionate about but to be honest value investing has gone out of "vogue" recently in the academic press. I would advise reading the Journal of Finance and Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis. Both are great journals that will demonstrate the level of detail that is required to write a successful academic paper. You need to drastically narrow your topic from the size of a football field to about a yard-by-yard box.

As the poster above stated you need to start asking yourself questions about what you find interesting about either value investing or small cap stocks and drill that down to a very specific, testable level.

 

Thank you for your comments on my forum post. I haven’t found a PHD place yet but so far I have made a couple contacts and one condition for applications is a thesis proposal and hence the request for help. My overall interest is to spend the next 3 years trying to prove if Small cap Value indeed outperforms other asset classes. There isn’t much academic literature in this area but there is a loads of value investing and small caps…but not much about small value stocks. I guess I have to try to narrow this down… a bit. Any suggestions…..of what a narrow topic could look like.

 

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