1. FMA – Doctoral Symposium Advice to Doctoral Students By Tarun Chordia These slides replicate the presentation of Jon Karpoff at the FMA 2000 doctoral symposium. The top ten list is a modified version of Wayne Ferson’s top ten list presented at the Inquire Europe seminar.

2. FMA – Doctoral Symposium Advice – Two pieces –Now that you are in the doctoral program, I will skip the first piece of advice Advice –At most top schools – you live and die on the basis of research –Teaching is extremely important as well

3. Dissertation and Doing Research For dissertation – if possible write papers that can be published as articles, not a huge book that sits on your shelf. Document everything you do. You will be surprised how often you will have to dig up old data and re-run old tests that you thought you were done with. For empirical work, do not underestimate the value of a unique dataset. You do not get credit for the dataset itself, but you do get credit for the papers you can generate from unique data. Ask for feedback. Listen to it. Listen some more.

4. Research Things that drive much new research Theory –New theories –Old Theories - Microeconomics core Other research –What has been published in the broad-based journals over the past four years?

5. Doing Research Choose a question that is interesting, unanswered, but potentially answerable with the tools you can muster. Know and use the scientific method. Start reading journals. Start writing papers as soon as you can. To get free training, do as much RA work as you can. RA work is like a post-doc served by many people in the biological and hard sciences, except that you get to do it before you finish your Ph.D degree.

6. Doing Research Seminars. Go to seminars, even if the paper is on a topic outside your area of interest. Go to the best seminars you can, at the best institutions. At good seminars, you learn as much from the audience's comments as you do from the presenter. You cannot get this learning by "just reading the paper." Avoid ex post theorizing. It is tempting to write your paper as if you anticipated your specific empirical results. If you didn't, don’t lie. Either conduct and report your tests the old-fashioned way (theory, predictions, tests, conclusions), or position the paper as more description than hypothesis testing (data, results, interpretations).

7. Doing Research Make sure you know why your topic is interesting and important. Warning: If you have to start a sentence by saying, "This is important because..." it probably isn't. If you have a good topic and you tell your story well, the importance will be self-evident. Does the motivation pass the elevator test? Focus is useful; How to get more than one paper out of the data? What are the questions to which we want answers? Persevere...

8. Research Ideas Data availability/new techniques –Transactions data –International data The world –What is going on in the world? –What do people care about? –What issues do managers struggle with?

9. What’s HOT? What's hot is idiosyncratic. E.g., microstructure, corporate theory, unit root tests, corporate governance: These topics seem obviously interesting and hot to people working on them, and mind-numbingly dull to others. Ask around -- Learn from what people are passionate about. Keep up with the journals – What’s hot is what is being published. Finally, what are you interested in?

10. What’s Hot? What Have I Been Working on? Conditional Asset Pricing Volatility and Trading Activity Liquidity and Short-run Reversals Earnings and Price Momentum Predicting Stock Returns The Cross-Section of Expected Trading Activity

11. Top 10 List of Ideas with my biases 6.International finance -- markets and market linkages, business practices and legal systems, asset returns 7.Derivative applications in new places -- Real options, tradeable emission rights, electricity futures 8.Entrepreneurial finance -- venture capital, IPO's 9.Old fashioned corporate finance -- capital structure, dividend policy. What can we tell managers? 10.Market and security design -- dealer vs. intermediated; concentrated vs. fragmented markets; etc.

12. Top 10 List of Ideas with my biases 1.Links from microstructure to asset pricing -- Liquidity 2.Corporate Governance 3.Behavioral finance -- Thaler vs. Fama 4.Asset pricing with new twists -- Bayesian models, model uncertainty and estimation risk 5.Big picture questions -- the role of governments, trade flows, economic development, geography versus government

13. Having FUN! 1.We make more money than most other academics! 2.We could quit and go to Wall Street. 3.We get to work on conditional pricing, MCMC, etc. 4.Deans wonder why we get paid so much to study models that don’t work. 5.We have the smartest doctoral students. 6.Neighbors share their investment ideas at parties. 7.Practitioners actually read our papers. 8.On the whole we do what we want, when we want. 9.We have no bosses asking about the Smith account. 10.We have lots of data and for the asset pricing people all our data are machine readable – no hand collection.