Head of Department’s welcome
Welcome to the Department of Finance at The University of Melbourne!
As you explore the department's website, you will get a feel for the spirit and aspirations of our department: a place where students and scholars work together to understand and address important financial issues that face us today and in the future, where innovation and discovery are driven by a desire to ask and solve questions and where a commitment to Melbourne’s finance industry and the wider community informs our research and teaching efforts.
Finance has been taught at this University for many years but a separate department specialising in finance was not established until July 2001. The Department now has 25 full-time academic staff, 6 full-time professional staff and a large number of sessional teaching staff. We currently have approximately 8700 subject enrolments, of which 7100 are undergraduate and 1600 are postgraduate.
Our graduates are highly sought after by major employers in the finance sector in Melbourne, inter-state Australia, and overseas. At the undergraduate level, the Department is one of four departments teaching into the Bachelor of Commerce. The Department provides its undergraduate students with an education that prepares them both for employment as a finance specialist and for postgraduate study in finance. In addition, many undergraduate students at Melbourne choose to study finance as a supporting area for specialisations in economics, econometrics and accounting. In the fourth honours year, a small number of the very best undergraduate students undertake further specialised study in finance as well as original research reported in a research essay.
The Department is involved in several programs at the postgraduate level, both professional and academic in nature. The professional Masters programs include the specialist career advancement Master of Applied Finance, and the Master of Financial Management, and the generalist Master of Applied Commerce. The Master of Applied Finance offers advanced applied finance training for graduates of any discipline, but with substantial work experience in a finance-related occupation, to enhance their career in finance. The Master of Financial Management has a similar aim, but does require some prior finance studies to offset a lack of relevant work experience. The Master of Commerce (Finance) provides advanced academic training in the finance discipline for applicants with a strong academic record in a finance-focused undergraduate degree, and may lead to subsequent PhD studies in finance.
The research interests of the Department cover a wide range of areas, including corporate finance, investments and asset pricing, international finance, derivative securities, real estate finance, financial institutions management and financial regulation. The Department is particularly strong in derivatives research, with the Melbourne Derivatives Research Group as a focal point.
Maintaining a strong research record is pivotal to our Department. It informs our teaching programs and addresses and investigates issues of direct interest to the financial academic and business communities. Staff present their work in academic seminars and conferences including the AFA, EFA and FMA meetings, but also in practitioner-oriented workshops and symposia. Our staff members have published their research in the leading international finance journals including the Journal of Banking and Finance, The Journal of Finance, and The Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, but also in more practically focused journals like Risk and the Financial Analysts Journal.
The Department has an active research seminar program and provides excellent facilities for its PhD candidates. Unlike many Australian universities, the PhD program in Finance at the University of Melbourne includes one year of coursework. The coursework component ensures that all PhD students are adequately prepared not only in finance but also in economics and econometrics and are thus provided with the best career training opportunities. To further expose our PhD students to the latest international curriculum, we invite a number of prestigious professorial fellows visiting from New York University, Northwestern University and from the University of Manchester, to teach into the PhD program.
The Department of Finance is committed to knowledge transfer. The Department is one of the founding members of the Melbourne Centre for Financial Studies, established in 2005 to foster a partnership between public and private sectors, and industry and academe. Our staff members offer tailored executive education programs, actively participate in professional associations, and are frequently invited to consult for the finance and corporate industry and for the public sector. In exchange, finance practitioners actively participate in our teaching programs, by providing applied topics lectures in our undergraduate finance program and by lecturing specialist subjects in our professional postgraduate programs.
Thank you for visiting our website. I hope you find it interesting and useful. Do contact us if you want to know more about us or the opportunities we offer.
Paul Kofman
Professor of Finance
Head of Department