Markus Schmid is Professor of Corporate Finance and Managing Director of the Institute of Banking and Finance at the University of St. Gallen. He is also affiliated with the Swiss Finance Institute and the European Corporate Governance Institute. He conducts research in the areas of corporate and household finance. Since 2017, he teaches the ProDok course Empirical Corporate Finance together with Christoph Schneider.

Empirical corporate finance is an economically interesting and multifaceted topic. It focuses on investment decisions and corporate financing, as well as conflicts of interest and corporate governance. The latter attempts to minimise the costs of such conflicts. From a methodological point of view, the topic is also interesting, as identifying causal relationships is a major challenge.

There will always be new questions, data sets and methods — such as those currently emerging in the field of machine learning — to enable innovative research in the future. At the same time, the finance sector has grown strongly and become more competitive, meaning that an academic career requires perseverance, flexibility and a bit of luck.

In the early days of my scientific career, inspiration for research topics came primarily from the academic world, i.e. journal publications and conference presentations. Later, discussions with industry representatives as well as political and social events were increasingly added as sources of ideas. Motivated and imaginative co-authors are also a valuable source of inspiration.

... I am looking forward to future Empirical Corporate Finance courses, where I will have the opportunity to exchange ideas with many motivated PhD students from different universities in the DACH region.

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