Exam Preparation#
This page provides a running outline of what will be covered on each exam.
Midterm Exam#
The midterm covers material from Weeks 1–4, including all lecture notes, in-class discussions, and homework assignments HW 0 through HW 3.
Online Notes#
We may not cover every page of the online notes during class. All material in the course notes is fair game for the midterm and final exams, including pages not explicitly discussed in class. You are responsible for reading the full notes on your own.
Required “Reading” from Homework Assignments#
Each homework assignment includes a Required “Reading” section. All material from those sections (HW 0 through HW 3) may appear on the midterm.
Papers#
The following papers may be covered on the midterm:
Bybee, L., Kelly, B., Manela, A., & Xiu, D. (2024). Business News and Business Cycles. Journal of Finance, 79(5), 3105–3147. https://doi.org/10.1111/jofi.13377
Bybee, L., Kelly, B., & Su, Y. (2023). Narrative Asset Pricing: Interpretable Systematic Risk Factors from News Text. The Review of Financial Studies, 36(12), 4759–4787. https://doi.org/10.1093/rfs/hhad042
Chen, Y., Kelly, B., & Xiu, D. (2022). Expected Returns and Large Language Models. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4416687
He, S., Lv, L., Manela, A., & Wu, J. (2025). Chronologically Consistent Large Language Models. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.21206
He, S., Lv, L., Manela, A., & Wu, J. (2025). Instruction Tuning Chronologically Consistent Language Models. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.11677
Liu, Z., Huang, D., Huang, K., Li, Z., & Zhao, J. (2020). FinBERT: A pre-trained financial language representation model for financial text mining. IJCAI International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2021-Janua, 4513–4519. https://doi.org/10.24963/IJCAI.2020/622
Lopez-Lira, A., Tang, Y., et al. (2023). Can ChatGPT Forecast Stock Price Movements? Return Predictability and Large Language Models. SSRN Electronic Journal. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4412788
Final Exam#
The final exam is cumulative. All material from the midterm is fair game, in addition to material covered in the second half of the course. All homework assignments are also fair game for the final.
Required “Reading” from Homework Assignments#
All Required “Reading” from all homework assignments may appear on the final exam.
Papers#
All papers listed under the midterm section above may appear on the final, plus any additional papers listed below.
Additional papers for the final will be posted here as the course progresses.