This course is a graduate-level introduction to financial economics. It is intended mainly for Master students in Finance and for Master and Ph.D. students in Economics. It is required for the Master of Finance program, and it is expected for a Ph.D. concentration in Finance. It may also be appropriate for others who have a strong interest in the fundamentals and research in the social science of financial economics.

The course introduces several major areas of research: market efficiency, asset pricing, market microstructure, corporate governance, information flow from corporations to markets, capital structure and securities issuance. You will note that the early topics in this list are more "in the market" and the later topics are more "in the firm," with a continuum flowing in between. Depth of coverage varies according to the topic, based on my judgment of what makes for a a cohesive yet broad course, considering the time available in a one-semester survey. As a first survey-oriented course in financial economics, the major goal is education as to the broad topics, methods and questions that are the domain of financial economics.

This is a course in the science of finance for practical people.  In contract to other social sciences, finance does not so often use the scientific literature of the field to engage practitioner students in the start of a life-long process of learning as the field learns. As a science, finance does understand some important topics clearly, and has strong methods for working on understanding the rest. I invite you to "learn to learn" with the field.

Want to know about other students' opinion on this course and my other courses? Here is a summary of 2009 teacher evaluations. In a nutshell, I think they say "I worked really hard, the professor worked with me, and I learned a lot." But don't let me spin it...have a look.

Prerequisites. I have seen students succeed in this course when they have either of the following preparations.

• One way to be ready for this course is to have taken FINC 870 and an econometrics course. Finance master students tend to come with this preparation.
• Another way to be ready is to have taken a graduate microeconomics course, a graduate econometrics course, and some sort of introductory finance course. Economics graduate students tend to come with this preparation. A determined economics student who has not take a prior finance course could substitute some assigned reading over the winter term.
• A bureaucratic note: When I look at the course catalog, it is not clear to me that the prereq is for either of these preparations. It seems to me that one could mistakenly think that both are needed. That is not so. The misimpression is a function of the template that must be used to input the prereq info.