When the Federal Reserve announces a rate hike, do financial stocks and tech stocks react the same way? Do companies with high ESG scores actually earn better returns over the long run? Questions like these drive the empirical finance course Cambridge economist Michael Ashby designed for CRI's 2026 Seoul Research Program. Students learn the theory, work with real market data, and find out in a team research paper whether the theory holds.
Who teaches it
Michael Ashby teaches economics at the University of Cambridge, where he is also a deputy director of admissions at one of the university's colleges. Because he helps select and advise students as well as teach them, he is an unusually well-placed mentor for high school students who hope to study at a selective university.
His research sits where financial markets meet econometrics. He analyzes asset markets, measures risk, evaluates policy, and uses causal inference to study the questions behind real financial decisions. A central thread is measuring and forecasting uncertainty in the financial system, work with practical uses for policy institutions, investment firms, and academic researchers.
At Cambridge, his teaching centers on financial econometrics and empirical asset pricing. He is known for moving students past theory toward an understanding of how real markets and real data behave. The Seoul Research Program extends that teaching to students in Asia.
What the course covers
Empirical finance puts every theory to one test: does it survive contact with the data? Professor Ashby's course builds toward that test in four stages.
- Core concepts. Students learn the structure of financial markets, the theory of market efficiency, and the main asset pricing models, including the capital asset pricing model (CAPM) and multifactor models.
- Quantitative tools. Using regression and panel data analysis, students learn to study asset prices, risk, and investor behavior, practicing on real financial datasets along the way.
- ESG, climate risk, and behavioral finance. The course examines how environmental, social, and governance (ESG) factors and climate risk affect asset prices, and it tests the influence of investor psychology and other behavioral factors with data.
