Ph.D. Program

The course provides foundational material for analytical studies of financial markets. Emphasis is on continuous time mathematics as applied to pricing of financial assets. The course focuses on foundational material, typically covering influential classical papers that introduce and illustrate key concepts and techniques.

This class is focused on measuring and understanding risk premiums in the financial markets. Thinking about risk premiums necessarily involves modelling the pricing kernel. This course will study evidence pertaining to the pricing kernel and applied theoretical developments that are motivated by the evidence. Primarily, we will focus on modelling of equities and bonds with some time dedicated to options and currencies.

This is meant to be a first course in the Theory of Corporate Finance for Ph.D. students. The emphasis will be on gaining a working knowledge of the literature as well familiarity with common modeling techniques. Topics covered include Capital structure under asymmetric information and agency problems, security design, dynamic investment policies, and structural estimation of equilibrium models in corporate finance.

This course familiarizes students with some of the major areas of ongoing research in empirical corporate finance, and gives them experience evaluating and proposing empirical projects. The focus is twofold: First, the state of knowledge about corporate and household finance as informed by empirical work; and second, methodological and philosophical issues arising in empirical research in finance specifically, and the social sciences generally.

This course is intended to introduce students to the research frontier of dynamic and quantitative modeling and estimation in macro finance. We begin with an introduction to two key tools, dynamic programming and computational methods, and variants of GMM estimation. Following that, we will explore the following topics: Asset liquidity, slow moving capital and market segmentation, intermediary-based asset pricing, dynamic models of corporate finance, financial frictions and business cycles, and human and labor capital in finance.

In this course, we will consider papers in that have added to our knowledge of how information is processed in financial markets, from both rational and behavioral standpoints. Emphasis will be on classical models with rational expectations, as well as psychological approaches to stock price movements. We will also review a behavioral interpretation of the evidence on securities prices and trading by agents in financial markets.