Stefan Voigt loves to teach – and is now being honoured for it

From this year, the Danish Finance Institute (DFI) is awarding a prize to a university lecturer who has made a remarkable educational effort.

The first prize was awarded at DFI's annual conference on October 13th. It went to Stefan Voigt, assistant professor of finance at the University of Copenhagen, for an extraordinary effort to promote the subject of finance in an educational context - via teaching, supervision, and in other educational ways.

Stefan Voigt is very grateful for DFI's teaching award and shares some of the credit with his colleagues. He believes that it reflects the enormous support he received from his colleagues to design new courses in empirical finance.

"The most important thing for me is that I genuinely enjoy teaching at the University of Copenhagen. The students are talented and eager to learn more – a perfect combination when you want to engage in meaningful discussions about current research," Stefan Voigt points out.

Teamwork makes coding more fun

With the help of his colleagues, Stefan Voigt has designed the course "Advanced Empirical Finance: Topics and Data Science". The course has one purpose: to pass on all the practical tools that he, as a PhD student himself, would have loved to have access to in order to do research in empirical asset pricing.

“I probably ask a lot from my students, but it is fantastic to see how they develop their own tools from scratch and carry out their own first research projects. The students review their peers' codes, give each other feedback, and – as far as I can see from the evaluations – have fun conducting their own little research projects in groups instead of just reading and thinking about the methods I teach,” says Stefan Voigt.

Together with two co-authors (and with lots of feedback from former students on the course), Stefan Voigt has created the textbook "Tidy Finance with R". The book summarizes the often very tedious code required to build meaningful data science applications in finance.

"I am very much looking forward to future editions of the course, which we also offer as tailor-made workshops for professionals. It is therefore amazing to see that the Danish Finance Institute acknowledges all our efforts to improve the teaching of topics within finance at our institute," he concludes.