The Department of Accounting and Finance at Lancaster University Management School (LUMS) invites applications for its PhD programme in Accounting and Finance. You will work alongside world-leading academics in a busy, exciting, and innovative department.
We are looking for highly motivated candidates who have an excellent undergraduate degree and outstanding performance at master's level. Qualifications should be in a related discipline to your intended PhD studies. You should also be committed to pursuing an academic career.
The department offers an excellent research environment, with a high level of collegiality, subscriptions to state-of-the-art databases, a strong seminar series, and a senior visitors programme. It is one of the largest departments within Lancaster's globally recognised, triple-accredited international business school.
PhD students in Accounting and Finance are required to complete a portfolio of advanced courses and seminars that cover finance theory, econometric methods, statistical methods, and research methodology. Upon completing the coursework successfully, you will conduct research and write a thesis on a topic that you are passionate about. Two subject matter experts will offer detailed supervision to ensure that your research contributes new knowledge to the academic community.
Additionally, you will have the opportunity to gain international experience by visiting a leading school in the US or Europe that specialises in a relevant research area. We offer an excellent environment for PhD studies, which includes dedicated office space, generous funding for conference and research visits, access to numerous specialised databases, as well as scientific computing facilities, and IT support.
For many years, the department has consistently strengthened its doctoral programme. We have developed a comprehensive PhD training system to help our graduates succeed in the job market. In addition to the training provided by our excellent faculty, the department regularly invites distinguished visiting professors from top universities around the world to conduct doctoral tutorials on specialised research topics. Our PhD students are privileged to receive training from world-leading scholars each summer and have extensive opportunities to consult with external experts.
In recent years, our PhD graduates have successfully joined many excellent universities, research centres and institutions, including the Australian National University, Bocconi University, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Durham, LSE, Liverpool, Maastricht, Manchester, Monash, Oxford, and Warwick Universities.
Lancaster University Management School: 100% of research environment rated 'world-leading' and rated number 1 business school in the UK for 'research power' in REF 2021.
Jackie talks about why she chose Lancaster University Management School for her PhD in Accounting and Finance
Transcript for Why study a Phd: Jackie
When you speak to an international student about Lancaster University Management School, people know that's a brand. And also for our department, I think we have a really good reputation for our research programme. My research is about the empirical application of financial modelling to extracting the information of prices of the financial derivative instruments, so applying data to financial modelling and using econometric methods, I can extract the information from those prices and look at the worldwide volatility interactions of the equity market. On the research side, I've been given a lot of support from my colleagues and especially my supervisors and all the academic staff in my department, so whenever you feel like you're stuck somewhere, you can always just go and talk to people and get some ideas and then just work your difficulty out. The biggest highlight is that I get to travel abroad and go to summer schools and conferences and talk to those most brilliant people in the field of research. That's really helpful for research environments where you can learn from others.
Databases
The Department of Accounting and Finance provides you with access to a number of leading financial databases. This valuable resource enables you to acquire crucial skills that are highly desirable to employers, helping you stand out in the competitive job market.
The Management School's doctoral office offers a range of optional research training seminars to enhance your skills.
Year 1
Induction workshop, which includes research integrity and ethical research
Foundations of management research
Central themes in management
Year 2
Research skills – data collection and analysis
Delivering impactful research
Structured writing retreats
Year 3
Communicating with different research audiences
Structured writing retreats
Entry requirements
Academic requirements
A relevant Master's degree (UK or equivalent) with distinction-level performance, both overall and in the dissertation. In exceptional circumstances, applicants with an upper second-class honours degree and relevant research experience may be considered.
If you have studied outside of the UK, we would advise you to check our list of international qualifications before submitting your application.
Additional requirements
As part of your application you will also need to provide a viable research proposal of up to 5000 words which has potential to make a significant contribution to prior literature. Guidance can be found on our writing a research proposal webpage.
English language requirements
We may ask you to provide a recognised English language qualification, dependent upon your nationality and where you have studied previously.
We normally require an IELTS (Academic) Test with an overall score of at least 7.5 and a minimum of 6.0 in each element of the test. We also consider other English language qualifications.
Delivered in partnership with INTO Lancaster University, our one-year tailored pre-master’s pathways are designed to improve your subject knowledge and English language skills to the level required by a range of Lancaster University master’s degrees. Visit INTO Lancaster University for more details and a list of eligible degrees you can progress onto.
Course structure
You will study a range of modules as part of your course, some examples of which are listed below.
Information contained on the website with respect to modules is correct at the time of publication, but changes may be necessary, for example as a result of student feedback, Professional Statutory and Regulatory Bodies' (PSRB) requirements, staff changes, and new research. Not all optional modules are available every year.
Core
core modules accordion
Our research seminars with external speakers attract leading academics who present their current research. Attending such seminars will expose you to current research trends and allow you to expand your network. We encourage active student participation in seminars and their contact with seminar speakers. To facilitate better understanding of seminar papers, we will conduct regular pre-seminar meetings that are going to discuss in detail presented papers. The objectives of pre-seminar meetings are:
Facilitate better understanding of current research streams and presented papers;
Provide a platform for exchanging ideas and opinions on current research streams;
Help you provide informed feedback on presented research;
Improve your writing skills and critical thinking;
Further connect PhD students and our faculty by conducting regular meetings with different faculty members.
This module covers key theoretical areas of financial accounting research. It provides a crucial link to the literature for students seeking to strengthen the theoretical foundations of their empirical research. The underlying perspective is an economic one and implicitly assumes a stock market setting defines the corporate financial information environment.
By the end of the module, you will be able to understand four fundamental theoretical areas that underpin research in financial accounting, namely mandatory financial disclosure, voluntary financial disclosure, the politics of accounting regulation, and agency and contracting theory.
The module covers four topics as follows:
The social value of (mandatory) financial disclosure
Voluntary financial disclosure
The role of regulation in accounting research
Agency and contracting theory
This module is designed to introduce you to some of the core issues associated with empirical accounting research through the review of recent trends in accounting research. The module will discuss the importance of incremental contribution, basic research design issues, issues with analysing data and tabulating results, and extending extant research. The module will comprise a mixture of faculty-led lectures, interactive student-led presentations and discussions.
Topics:
Accounting conservatism
Recognition vs. disclosure
IFRS adoption
Bank accounting
Financial instruments and fair value accounting
Economic consequences of financial reporting and disclosure
This is a module in accounting research for first-year doctoral students. The module comprises nine weekly sessions, each based on a published academic paper (or suite of papers). Each session involves a student-led discussion of the paper(s), with faculty providing a facilitating role for the discussion. The aim is to understand key research contributions, methods, and opportunities for further research.
Topics:
The determinants and consequences of accounting choice
Various measures of earnings quality and their determinants and consequences
Accounting anomalies and the use of accounting information in fundamental analysis
The role of auditors as a corporate governance mechanism
The application of experimental methods to examine accounting issues
Understanding of behavioural theory in accounting research
The module covers various aspects of equilibrium asset prices in dynamic economies. The aims of this module are to introduce you to the main asset pricing theories that are fundamental to research development in finance and to provide an understanding of how asset pricing models are formally constructed.
On completion of this module, successful students will be able to have
an understanding of key elements in the mainstream asset pricing theories,
systematic knowledge in both implications of asset pricing models and empirical implementations.
Topics covered:
Utility preferences 2
Mean-variance theory and the CAPM
Stochastic discount factor
Arrow-Debreu economy and state prices
Dynamic programming
Consumption-based asset pricing
Production-based asset pricing.
This module builds upon the Manchester-taught module AcF853, which is an advanced, dominantly theoretical asset pricing course. Spillover effects from AcF851 Advanced Quantitative Methods are also anticipated.
In the first part of the module, recent advances in cross-sectional asset pricing will be covered. This will include an empirical treatment of the classical asset pricing model and its extensions and related testing and model specification approaches. This part will cover the critical assessment of existing models in the light of risk-based and behaviour explanations as well as multi-factor models related to profitability and investment patterns across firms.
The second part of the module will focus on the consumption-based model both from a theoretical and empirical perspective.
In the third part of the module, asset pricing with option-implied information will be covered. This includes the theoretical coverage, and understanding of the options data structure as well as the empirical implementation in advanced software packages.
The last part of the module will focus on mutual and hedge funds. This includes their performance evaluation and performance attribution from a mainly empirical perspective. Unique characteristics of hedge funds and various hedge fund strategies will be covered.
The topics covered in this module will be fine-tuned to the specific decomposition of each year's PhD student cohort.
This module is designed to help you understand how to operationalise empirical research on topics that are central to corporate finance. The overarching goal is to expose you to “state-of-the-art” empirical research methods and prepare you to conduct your own work using new tools. All students with an interest in finance, economics, accounting, human resources, and related disciplines are welcome to take the module.
The module will include:
Endogeneity and Basic Identification Strategies
Difference Estimators
LATE and Regression Discontinuity Design
Matching Estimators
This module introduces the knowledge and skills in empirical research on corporate finance. Topics include capital structure, corporate liquidity management, payout policies, and executive compensation. Selected papers in relevant literature will be discussed, with a focus on research ideas, data sources, and empirical methodologies. This module aims to help you identify and formulate research questions that may lead to dissertation topics.
After successfully completing the module, you should have:
A broader knowledge of empirical research in corporate finance;
A better understanding of how empirical techniques can be used to answer research questions in the areas covered in the module;
More confidence in presenting and defending your own research;
Formulate one research idea with a concrete research agenda.
This module will cover econometric techniques on an advanced level that form the basis for quantitative and empirical research in Finance and Accounting. It will also cover the related necessary programming skills in advanced econometrics and statistical software packages such as MatLab and GAUSS. The module will start with covering two key areas:
Generalised Methods of Moments and ii)
Maximum Likelihood Techniques in: a) time series models, b) multiple equations models and c) panel frameworks.
Depending on the composition of the cohort, additional advanced methods that will be covered in the course may include Simulated Maximum Likelihood, Efficient Important Sampling, Indirect Inference, Bayesian Methods, High-Frequency Financial Econometrics, Point Processes, Count Data Models, Limited Dependent Variable models.
The success of developing and publishing accounting research critically depends on the knowledge of the data and programming skills to manage large datasets. This module will introduce the key databases in accounting research, train you on how to use these data, and develop your programming skills and applied econometrics.
This module is designed to introduce you to the primary research design choices and methods in empirical accounting research. It covers data collection and main financial databases, handling large datasets using STATA, analysing data and tabulating results. It provides a broad overview of major data operations and statistical techniques used in accounting research and shows how to effectively program using STATA and other software packages. Furthermore, the module introduces the Python and R programming languages.
This module covers the econometric theory and application of selected econometric methods. The first part (Weeks 1-5) covers Time Series Econometrics, Panel Data Econometrics and Financial Econometrics. The second part (Weeks 6-10) covers Panel Data extensions, Discrete choice models and Tobit models.
Topics:
Time Series Econometrics: Statistical Inference, Time Series Modelling, Modes of Convergence, Spurious regression, Nonparametric Methods
Panel Data Econometrics: Pooled Regression, Fixed Effects/Random Effects, Dynamic Panel Models
The pilot study/research proposal for the PhD scheme continues on from the research undertaken in the literature review and is the final preparation before your initial paper. It is intended to help you expand your knowledge of the appropriate theoretical and empirical literature and attempt to plan a project that would make an incremental contribution to the research area. This may consist of collecting an appropriate data set that will be analysed at a later date or constructing a theoretical framework that can be built on at a later date.
Optional
optional modules accordion
The aim of this module is to equip you with the tools necessary to enable you to make the core investment management decisions that managers face daily, as well as the knowledge as to where you can find the information necessary to apply those tools.
This course covers fundamental concepts and key issues in factor investing;
equilibrium theories of asset pricing
mutual funds, ETFs and hedge funds
Environmental, Social and Governance
textual analysis in empirical asset pricing
This module is designed to introduce students who have no or little programming experience to Python programming in the context of academic research and real-life problem-solving in accounting and finance.
This module aims to develop your interest and confidence in financial programming and analysing big financial data and to equip you with programming skills and data-driven problem-solving abilities.
This module will enable you to understand the key concepts and methods in data science, econometrics, and quantitative finance to carry out independent empirical work required for the job market, more advanced modules in accounting and finance and the MSc dissertation streams.
There may be extra costs related to your course for items such as books, stationery, printing, photocopying, binding and general subsistence on trips and visits. Following graduation, you may need to pay a subscription to a professional body for some chosen careers.
Specific additional costs for studying at Lancaster are listed below.
College fees
Lancaster is proud to be one of only a handful of UK universities to have a collegiate system. Every student belongs to a college, and all students pay a small College Membership Fee which supports the running of college events and activities. Students on some distance-learning courses are not liable to pay a college fee.
For students starting in 2025, the fee is £40 for undergraduates and research students and £15 for students on one-year courses.
Computer equipment and internet access
To support your studies, you will also require access to a computer, along with reliable internet access. You will be able to access a range of software and services from a Windows, Mac, Chromebook or Linux device. For certain degree programmes, you may need a specific device, or we may provide you with a laptop and appropriate software - details of which will be available on relevant programme pages. A dedicated IT support helpdesk is available in the event of any problems.
The University provides limited financial support to assist students who do not have the required IT equipment or broadband support in place.
For most taught postgraduate applications there is a non-refundable application fee of £40. We cannot consider applications until this fee has been paid, as advised on our online secure payment system. There is no application fee for postgraduate research applications.
For some of our courses you will need to pay a deposit to accept your offer and secure your place. We will let you know in your offer letter if a deposit is required and you will be given a deadline date when this is due to be paid.
The fee that you pay will depend on whether you are considered to be a home or international student. Read more about how we assign your fee status.
If you are studying on a programme of more than one year’s duration, tuition fees are reviewed annually and are not fixed for the duration of your studies. Read more about fees in subsequent years.
Scholarships and bursaries
You may be eligible for the following funding opportunities, depending on your fee status and course. You will be automatically considered for our main scholarships and bursaries when you apply, so there's nothing extra that you need to do.
Unfortunately no scholarships and bursaries match your selection, but there are more listed on scholarships and bursaries page.
The Visiting PhD Scholars programme is intended for current doctoral students who are sufficiently fluent in English and proficient in their disciplines to make a positive contribution to Lancaster University Management School's (LUMS) research culture.
Applicants must be doctoral students. Individuals who have already obtained their PhD are not eligible for this programme.
The Visiting PhD Scholars programme and its requirements and procedures are subject to change without notice.
Cost
Visiting PhD Scholars are charged a registration levy of £500 for visits of up to 3 months.
For visits lasting more than three months, visiting PhD Scholars are charged a tuition fee at the standard rate (e.g., £21,620 per year at the 2025/6 rate) or on a pro-rata basis. The department is a member of the EAA ARC International PhD Visit Scheme, which provides funding for visiting PhD Scholars.
Application
In order to apply for this PhD Visiting Scholar Program, students must first find a LUMS faculty supervisor. A directory of Accounting and Finance faculty, along with a description of their research interests and contact information, can be found on the Faculty pages.
To be considered, applicants must submit the following documents to PhD Director in Accounting, Dr Justin Chircorp or PhD Director in Finance, Dr Chelsea Yao.
A request for a specific time to visit (begin date and end date)
A brief statement (not to exceed two pages) written by the applicant explaining the purpose and goals of the visit, including the details of the research project that the applicant plans to work on while in Lancaster
A recommendation letter from a faculty member at the applicant’s home institution.
Interested students should apply at least three months prior to the start of their intended visit.
I have hugely benefited from the regular meetings I had with my supervisors. They kept a close eye on my progress and were genuinely interested in my development as a researcher.
My supervisors provided me with excellent mentorship and always encouraged me, giving good advice.
Top 100 in the world for Accounting and Finance
Lancaster is ranked 14th in the UK and joint 90th in the world for Accounting and Finance according to the QS World University Rankings by Subject 2025, one of nine subjects at Lancaster to be featured in the top 100 in these prestigious listings.
The information on this site relates primarily to 2025/2026 entry to the University and every effort has been taken to ensure the information is correct at the time of publication.
The University will use all reasonable effort to deliver the courses as described, but the University reserves the right to make changes to advertised courses. In exceptional circumstances that are beyond the University’s reasonable control (Force Majeure Events), we may need to amend the programmes and provision advertised. In this event, the University will take reasonable steps to minimise the disruption to your studies. If a course is withdrawn or if there are any fundamental changes to your course, we will give you reasonable notice and you will be entitled to request that you are considered for an alternative course or withdraw your application. You are advised to revisit our website for up-to-date course information before you submit your application.
More information on limits to the University’s liability can be found in our legal information.
Our Students’ Charter
We believe in the importance of a strong and productive partnership between our students and staff. In order to ensure your time at Lancaster is a positive experience we have worked with the Students’ Union to articulate this relationship and the standards to which the University and its students aspire. Find out more about our Charter and student policies.
