We are thrilled to congratulate our very own Chiara Lattanzio and Gabriel Ruiz Radrigan, both affiliated with the UCL Centre for Finance and currently completing our PhD in Financial Economics, on their exciting next career steps!

Chiara has accepted an offer from the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), where she will join the Monetary and Economic Department as an Economist.

Gabriel has accepted an offer from the Central Bank of Chile, where he will join the International Analysis Unit of the Monetary Policy Division as a Senior Economist.

We wish Chiara and Gabriel every success in their new roles and look forward to following their careers.

Congratulations to our junior researchers, James Symons-Hicks and Yihan Xu, on their outstanding academic achievements and next steps in their research careers.

James, a UCL Economics BSc and MSc graduate, worked as a Research Assistant at the UCL Centre for Finance from 2022 to 2024 and is currently a Predoctoral Research Fellow at LSE. This autumn, James will begin the PhD Economics program at the University of California, Berkeley.

Yihan, who holds a BA in Financial Mathematics and Financial Engineering from Shandong University and an MSc in Econometrics and Mathematical Economics from LSE, has been a Predoctoral Research Fellow at the UCL Centre for Finance since 2024. Yihan will continue his academic journey in the PhD Financial Economics program at UCL.

We are incredibly proud of their accomplishments and excited to see the impact they will make in academia and beyond. Wishing both of them every success in this next chapter.

We are delighted that Helena Palma Carvalho has won the Resolution Young Researcher Award at the 2026 SRB Economic Conference, organised by the Single Resolution Board (SRB) in Brussels on 18–19 March 2026. Helena presented her paper, “Suboptimal lending with deposit insurance”, at the Resolution Young Researchers Workshop, which formed part of the conference programme. Congratulations!

Chiara Lattanzio and Gabriel Ruiz Radrigan will be on the 2025-2026 job market.

Chiara's JMP shows that partnerships between banks and non-banks can be designed to exploit regulatory asymmetries; These arrangements can increase credit supply, but also result in higher rent extraction.
Banks and Non-Banks: Competitors in Loans Origination, Partners in Regulatory Arbitrage

Gabriel's JMP studies how low corporate deposit pass-through shapes monetary transmission. He find that monetary policy tightening is less effective at stabilising inflation yet more contractionary. The deposit spread prices exposure to a debt-deflation channel arising from firms’ financing mix.
Corporate Deposit-Rate Spread and Monetary Policy Transmission

Please find more details here.

The School of Management and the Centre for Finance (Department of Economics) at University College London invite applications for positions in Finance, at any rank.

Assistant Professor: Candidates should submit applications via the Econ Job Market website (https://econjobmarket.org/positions/11976; deadline 17 Nov 2025). We will be interviewing candidates online via Zoom during the week of the EEA European Job Market (in December 2025).

Associate and Full Professor: Positions will be opened shortly, and on a rolling basis until they are filled. If you are potentially interested, you are encouraged to signal such interest by sending a CV to cff.recruitment@ucl.ac.uk.

The registration for the 2025 UCL Centre for Finance Annual Lecture by Professor Lars Hansen, 2013 Nobel Laureate in Economics, is now open!

Professor Hansen will talk about "Uncertainty, Social Valuation, and Climate Change Policy."

The lecture will start at 6pm on Tuesday, September 30th, at Cruciform Building B3.04 – LT 1 on UCL Bloomsbury Campus.

Provisional schedule:
18:00-19:00 → Lecture and Q+A
19:00-20:00 → Drinks and reception

Follow this link to register!

The FTG held its Summer Conference this past weekend at UCL School of Management in London. It was a great pleasure to host the conference! Many thanks to all speakers and participants, to Jean-Charles Rochet for an inspiring keynote lecture, and to Ming Yang and the whole team for organising. Details here.

The 2025 UCL Centre for Finance Annual Lecture will be delivered by Professor Lars Hansen, Nobel Laureate in Economics (2013).

Date: September 30, 2025
Location: UCL Bloomsbury Campus
Time: 6:00 PM

More details to follow.

Antonio Guarino received a UCL grant for the Social Science Plus project "Artificial Intelligence and Financial Markets: A Computational-Neuro-Economics Approach" with co-investigators, Benedetto de Martino and Mirco Musolesi (Computer Science). 

The finance group at UCL school of management is looking for a predoctoral research assistant starting this autumn. It is an exciting chance to interact with all of the academics in our group and support variety of projects at different stages. The position should last for two years and be suitable for masters level students with a strong interest in pursuing a PhD in economics or finance in the future.

Application by July 2 2025: here.

• Paper Submission Deadline: April 15, 2025 (GMT 11:59 p.m.).
• Notification: We will finalize paper selection and inform authors in early May.
• Capacity: The conference can accommodate up to 80 attendees. Registration is on a first-come, first-served basis.

The 2024 UCL Centre for Finance Annual Lecture will be given by Professor Romano Prodi, former President of the European Commission.

The lecture will start at 6pm on Thursday, October 24th, at UCL (Bloomsbury Campus) at the IOE’s Logan Hall, 20 Bedford Way, London WC1H 0AL.

Professor Prodi will be discussing "Europe between the United States and China: a Difficult Position?"

To attend, please register here.

Provisional schedule:
18:00-19:30 → Lecture and Q+A

19:30-20:30 → Drinks reception

We are delighted to announce our new MSc in Law and Finance, a joint initiative of the Faculty of Laws, the Department of Economics and the School of Management.

Our new one-year, executive-style Masters in Law and Finance will provide students with a cutting-edge education at the intersection of law and finance, with the opportunity to participate in a work placement at a financial institution or corporate law firm in London.

Visit the website for more information:

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/laws/study/msc-law-and-finance

The 2024 UCL Centre for Finance Annual Lecture will be given by Professor Romano Prodi, former President of the European Commission.

The lecture will start at 6pm on Thursday, October 24th, at UCL (Bloomsbury Campus) at the IOE’s Logan Hall, 20 Bedford Way, London WC1H 0AL.

To attend, please register here. 

Provisional schedule:
18:00-19:30 → Lecture and Q+A
19:30-20:30 → Drinks reception

UCL's PhD in Financial Economics programme is designed for graduates seeking an academic career as a faculty member in a top business school or Economics department or in the research group of a central bank.

We offer rigorous and solid training in quantitative and economics methods for the study of financial markets and institutions. We offer competitive scholarships to all admitted students.

To apply: visit our webpage

The first application window closes on 31 January 2024. Applications made later than this will be considered depending on availability. 

For further information that is not addressed on our web pages, please contact the MRes/PhD Administrator (Nevenka Martin, mgmt-pgr@ucl.ac.uk) or its Director (Saleem Bahaj, s.bahaj@ucl.ac.uk).

The UCL School of Management is looking to appoint a forward-thinking and committed full-time Associate Professor (Education) in Finance. We are particularly interested in candidates with expertise in empirical finance.

Please find more information here

If you have any queries regarding the application process, please contact our HR team via email on mgmt-hrsom@ucl.ac.uk.

The 2023 UCL Centre for Finance Annual Lecture will be given by Maureen O'Hara, Robert W. Purcell Professor of Finance at Cornell University.

The event will start at 5.15pm on Wednesday 1st November in the Christopher Ingold Building (Chemistry Auditorium XLG2), 20 Gordon St, WC1H 0AJ (UCL Bloomsbury Campus).

If you wish to attend, please register here.

Professor O'Hara will be discussing "Liquidity in a Fragile World":

Liquidity and price discovery are mainstays of market microstructure research. Our usual assumption is that more is better but… it may not be that simple. Recent episodes in Gilt markets, corporate bond markets, and Treasury markets underscore that episodic illiquidity in on the rise in the fixed income markets. What is causing this illiquidity and what to do about it? Maureen’s talk draws on research on how the changing nature of fixed income markets is affecting the fragility of fixed income markets, highlighting the roles played by regulatory changes and the increasing role of electronic trading. Using recent research results, Maureen evaluates potential solutions to alleviating liquidity problems in a fragile world.

Bayesian and Not-so-Bayesian Belief Updating in Economics, Neuroscience, and Machine Learning'

Department of Economics & Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience

A one-day workshop with experts from different fields in academia and industry on 8th November 2023.

Organisers: Julen Ortiz de Zarate Pina (Economics), Benedetto De Martino (ICN), Antonio Guarino (Economics).

More details to follow soon.

The Finance, Accounting and Economics group at the UCL school of management is looking for a pre-doctoral research assistant. This is an exciting opportunity for a recent graduate or current student interested in doing a PhD to contribute to the research output of the UCL Centre for Finance.  Please find the job description and application link here:

Research Assistant_B04-04061

We are delighted that Ming Yang won the Charles River Associates Award for the best corporate finance paper at Western Finance Association (WFA) 2023. You can find the awarded paper "The Optimal Structure of Securities under Coordination Frictions” at the award announcement. Congratulations!

We are delighted to announce that Alexander Gorbenko has been promoted to full professor in Economics and Finance at UCL. Please see Alex' Centre for Finance profile and personal website to learn about his research. We thank Alex for his contribution to the Centre for Finance as a Research Fellow. Congratulations!

Dr Julen Ortiz de Zarate Pina (PI) and Professor Antonio Guarino (CoI) were awarded UCL’s Higher Education Innovation Fund (HEIF) for the project, ‘Economic and Financial Decision Making: A Neuro-economics Approach’, at the Experimental Laboratory for Finance and Economics (ELFE) at the Centre for Finance.

Frederic Malherbe, the director of the UCL Centre for Finance, published an OpEd on the drastic increase in banks' profits in recent months. Fred discussed where the banks' huge profits come from, how it can hurt the economy, and its potential solution: "Banks should be compelled to pass on rate rises to savers."
The OpEd is now available on the Financial Times website.

UCL's PhD in Financial Economics programme is a joint programme between the UCL Department of Economics and the UCL School of Management, designed for graduates seeking an academic career in a top business school or Economics department or in the research group of a central bank. The programme offers rigorous and solid training in quantitative and economics methods for the study of financial markets and institutions.

More details on the programme can be found in this video and here.

Funding: Admitted students are fully funded, including full fee waiver and a competitive stipend.

To apply: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/prospective-students/graduate/apply. When starting the application, you must select the MRes Financial Economics option.

Deadline: 15 Feb (but we’ll keep considering applications until all scholarships are awarded).

The UCL Centre for Finance is planning to run some experimental studies on financial decision making and would require the participation of financial professionals. Participants will be compensated. All information gathered in the experiment will be anonymised and treated as confidential. Neither their name or that of their institution will be mentioned anywhere. Their help would be of tremendous help to scientific research.

Please see the call for participants for all details: Call for participants - Financial Professionals

For any further information, please email Antonio Guarino at a.guarino@ucl.ac.uk

The UCL Centre for Finance’s Annual Lecture 2022 will be delivered by Dr Lorenzo Bini Smaghi, Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Société Générale, and previously a member of the Executive Board of the European Central Bank. The title of the talk is “Financing the Transition”.

The event will take place at UCL Bloomsbury Campus, Cruciform Building, B304 - LT1, on 23rd November at 6 pm.

Please register for your attendance here.

We will have the Cemmap's masterclass on Contracts and Market Microstructure, which will be given by Professor Robert Miller, Carnegie Mellon University. The class will be held for two days, 26 September - 27 September, at The Institute for Fiscal Studies.

You can find more information and book your place here.

We are pleased to announce that Ji Hee Yoon, our research fellow, has been appointed as an assistant professor of Economics and Finance at UCL in July 2022. She will continue working with us at the Centre for Finance. Congratulations!

We will have the 2021 UCL Centre for Finance Annual Lecture, which will be given by professor Hyun Song Shin, the Bank for International Settlement (BIS) economic adviser and the head of research. The title of the talk is “Overcoming “Original Sin” to Secure Policy Space.” The event is scheduled for the 10th November, at 5 pm (in London), over a Zoom webinar. You can find more information here.

The lecture is now available: video and text

We are delighted to announce that Frederic Malherbe has been promoted to full professor in Economics and Finance at UCL. His research covers various topics in economics and finance, including financial intermediation, banking regulation, and political economy. We thank Frederic for his contribution and support to the Centre for Finance as the Director. Congratulations!

We are very pleased to welcome Saleem Bahaj as a new Research Fellow of the Centre for Finance. Saleem has joined UCL as an Associate Professor from August 2021. He was previously affiliated with the Bank of England in the Research Hub.

The MRes and PhD in Financial Economics is a joint programme between the UCL Department of Economics and the UCL School of Management. The MRes programme will share modules with the MRes in Economics. The Mphil year will cover topics such as Corporate Finance, Asset Pricing, Financial Intermediation, Financial Econometrics, and Market Microstructure.

Funding: Admitted students are fully funded, including full fee waiver and a competitive stipend.

To apply: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/prospective-students/graduate/apply, after clicking 'accept and apply', you need to use the search by Department function. Under 'UCL School of Management' you'll see MRes Financial Economics listed as one of the options.
More details on the programme can be found here: https://www.mgmt.ucl.ac.uk/phd-financial-economics

Deadline: 28 Feb (but we’ll keep considering applications until all scholarships are awarded).

We are very pleased to welcome Ming Yang as a new Research Fellow of the Centre for Finance. Ming will join UCL as an Associate Professor from July 2020. He joins from Fuqua School of Business, Duke University.

We are very pleased to welcome Alexander Gorbenko as a new Research Fellow of the Centre for Finance. Alexander will join UCL as an Associate Professor from June 2020. He joins from Marshall School of Business, University of Southern California.

2019 Centre for Finance Public Lecture by Philip Lane (chief economist of the European Central Bank).

Title: The Yield Curve and Monetary Policy

Location: B304, UCL Cruciform Building (Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT)

Date: Monday 25nd, November, 6 pm until 7 pm

You can register for the event here.

The School of Management and the Department of Economics (where the Centre for Finance is located) at University College London invite applications for several positions in Finance (any rank). We will be interviewing candidates at the 2019 EEA meeting in Rotterdam and at the 2020 ASSA meeting in San Diego.

Application Instructions:

1. Assistant professor

The School of Management and the Department of Economics run a joint recruitment process. Interested candidates shall simply apply to the UCL ad on the Econ Job Market website. They will automatically be considered for all relevant positions (including joint positions). 

2. Associate and Full Professor

To express interest, please click here.

3. Post-doc

To express interest, please click here.

Closing date: 5pm GMT on 15 November 2019.

ELFE (Experimental Laboratory for Economics and Finance) receives approximately £220,000 from the UCL Research Capital Infrastructure Funding. The funding will be used to purchase advanced laboratory equipment which will allow for new types of studies.

The UCL Centre for Finance is planning to run some experimental studies on financial decision making and would require the participation of financial professionals. Participants will be remunerated. All information gathered in the experiment will be anonymised and treated as confidential. Neither their name or that of their institution will be mentioned anywhere. Their help would be of tremendous help to scientific research.

Please see the call for participants for all details: Call for participants-Financial Professionals

For any further information, please email Antonio Guarino at a.guarino@ucl.ac.uk

Inaugural lecture for the Centre for Finance by the Nobel laureate Jean Tirole:

“Is the financial system safer today than 10 years ago? Regulatory challenges for financial stability.”

Location: LT1, UCL Cruciform Building (Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT)

Date: Monday 22nd, October, 6 pm until 7 pm

Wei Cui and Antonio Guarino receive an ESRC grant for the project “Financial Market Frictions, Beliefs and the Macroeconomy: An Application to the Case of China”. Wei Cui is the Principal Investigator for this ESRC New Investigator Grant.

We are very pleased to welcome Frédéric Malherbe as a new research fellow of the Centre for Finance. Frédéric will join UCL as an associate professor from August 2018. He joins from London Business School.

We are very pleased to welcome Ji Hee Yoon as a new research fellow of the Centre for Finance. Ji Hee will join UCL as a postdoctoral research fellow from September 2018. She joins from the University of Wisconsin, where she is completing her PhD Economics.

Welcome to Centre for Finance. Please submit your email address to subscribe news from the centre.
To participate in an Experimental Laboratory for Finance and Economics, please go to the menu ‘Experiments’.
If you have any queries, contact us by sending an email to: cff@live.ucl.ac.uk