The School of Management at the University of St Andrews is one of the UK's leading business and management schools. It has a distinctive and proud identity as a smaller school focused on research and teaching of the highest quality. The School is research intensive, and is underpinned by a strong grounding in the social sciences. At postgraduate level, students can benefit from internationally recognised research expertise, as acknowledged in the 2014 Research Excellence Framework (REF), while still enjoying the benefits of a small and friendly institution. The PhD is studied over three to four years (or six to seven years part-time). Students produce a thesis comprising no more than 80,000 words, excluding the bibliography and appendices.<br><br>The Financial Institutions and Markets Group (FIM) has developed its research around three themes: competition, risk and performance of financial institutions. Research includes examining banks, credit unions, Islamic banks and microfinance institutions both pre and post the global financial crises.access to finance in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Research projects examine traditional forms of debt-based finance and alternative forms of equity finance such as equity crowdfunding.responsible finance. Here, the group investigates how social and environmental policies influence performance of corporations and investment funds, from the impact of pollution and carbon emissions on the cost of capital or firm value, to how social, religious or environmental constraints affect portfolio performance.