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Spring 2021 Course

Empirical Law and Finance

Prerequisite: None

Exam Type: No Exam

Empirical tools have been increasingly used in litigation, regulation, and policymaking in corporate law, corporate governance, and securities regulation fields. This course will aim to expose students to, and enable them to engage with, empirical work in these fields. To this end, sessions of this course will feature professors from law schools and business schools who will present and discuss their empirical research with the students.

The course will meet for six Wednesday sessions, which will be concentrated during the first two months of the semester.

There will be no exam. Instead, students will be asked to submit, before most sessions, a brief memo on the research to be discussed in the session, and grades will be based primarily on these memos. Students who wish to do so may choose to do an additional one- or two-credit independent research project in conjunction with the course.

Some background or interest in corporate law, economics, finance, or empirical methods will be helpful, but no technical knowledge in these areas will be necessary. Students who have questions regarding whether the course would be suitable for them should feel free to contact the instructor.