Current Teaching (Spring 2018)

B8306 - Capital Markets & Investments:

This is a first course in capital markets and investments, intended for students in the Masters in Business Administration program. The course has three principal goals:

  1. To introduce the principles of asset valuation from an applied perspective. The majority of the class is concerned with the valuation of financial securities. The valuation issues to be discussed are heavily used in portfolio management and risk management applications.
  2. To introduce the following concepts:
    • Arbitrage.
    • The term structure of interest rates.
    • Portfolio theory, risk-control and diversification.
    • Equilibrium asset pricing models; the CAPM.
    • Efficient and inefficient markets.
    • Performance evaluation.
    • Pricing and hedging basic derivative securities (futures and options.)
  3. To provide sufficient background knowledge for students seeking an overview of capital markets and an introduction to advanced finance courses.

B9310 - Seminar in Behavioral Finance:

This course is intended for advanced Masters and PhD students intending to do research in economics and finance. This course will review the current state of knowledge in behavioral finance. There will be several lectures, but most sessions will center around discussions of important papers in the academic literature. The papers will come from the finance, behavioral finance, and the experimental psychology literatures.

Broad topics to be covered are: empirical evidence on security markets (anomalies); evidence on individual and institutional behavior; limits of arbitrage; psychology, judgment and decision making; and other related topics.