CEMFI’s Master in Economics and Finance places a special emphasis on the elaboration of a Master thesis. The sixth term is fully devoted to work on the thesis, which is an original research piece in an area of the student’s choice.

Each student is assigned an adviser who helps him/her in identifying a suitable research topic and sees it to a good conclusion. In the course of their work on the thesis, students make two presentations in front of professors and fellow students. The first one is in February and it consists of a presentation of the research projects at an early stage, often giving rise to important feedback. The second takes place in May, where students present the first results of their research.

The Master Thesis defense takes place in a public session in June. The week after this presentation, students submit their work. This work is evaluated by the adviser and another CEMFI professor, and it is later graded in a faculty meeting at CEMFI.

Some of the best Master theses of each year appear in CEMFI’s Master Theses Series.

Master theses submitted in June 2009 include:

Oriol Carreras: “Banks in a dynamic general equilibrium model”, supervised by Javier Suárez (CEMFI).

Alejandro Fernández Cerezo: “Firm size, trade and productivity”, supervised by Claudio Michelacci (CEMFI).

Luis García Álvarez: “On the out-of-sample importance of conditional dependencies for portfolio selection”, supervised by Richard Luger (Emory University).

Manuel García Santana: “Small scale reservation laws: A quantitative analysis”, supervised by Josep Pijoan (CEMFI).

Ainara González de San Román: “Worker and firm effects with censored data”, supervised by Stéphane Bonhomme (CEMFI).

Guzmán González-Torres: “Financing heterogeneous entrepreneurs: Determinants of income inequality”, supervised by Andrés Erosa (IMDEA).

Ivan Kataryniuk: “A behavioural explanation for the IPO puzzles”, supervised by Guillermo Caruana (CEMFI).

Manuel Martínez Quesada: “Random fields models for interest rates: An empirical exercise”, supervised by Enrique Sentana (CEMFI).

Diego Pampliega: “Structural models of corporate debt with stochastic volatility”, supervised by Max Bruche (CEMFI).

Olivia Peraita: “Assessing the impact of macroeconomic cycles on losses of CDO tranches”, supervised by Javier Mencía (Banco de España).

Santiago Pereda: “Quantile regression discontinuity: Estimating the effect of class size on scholastic achievement”, Manuel Arellano (CEMFI).

Jorge Rodríguez Sánchez: “Realised semivariance analysis of intraday Spanish data”, supervised by Enrique Sentana (CEMFI).

Lucas Sal: “Dynamic factor models. A leading indicator for the Spanish economy”, supervised by Pedro Mira (CEMFI).

Álvaro Santos: “Stock lending, short selling and market returns: The Spanish market”, supervised by Arturo Bris (IMD).