ECON 135: Foundations of Finance

Course Description

For graduate students and advanced undergraduates. This course teaches the foundations of finance. Topics include internal rate of return and net present value, Black-Scholes option pricing, portfolio diversification and the Capital Asset Pricing Model, relationships between risk and return, market efficiency, and the valuation of derivative securities. Much of the analysis will build on the Arrow-DeBreu state preference model. Next, adverse selection and moral hazard in contracting and the design of auctions will be discussed. Towards the end of the course applied topics such as bank capital regulation, sovereign debt, pension funds, university endowments, and the evaluation of private equity performance and fees will be discussed, depending on time. Prerequisites: MATH 51, ECON 50, ECON 102A, or equivalents or with permission of the instructor; ability to use spreadsheets, and basic probability and statistics concepts including random variables, expected value, variance, covariance, and simple estimation and regression.