Course Descriptions

Listed below are titles of M.B.A.-level courses (for descriptions see the Simon Information Guide), and descriptions of Ph.D.-level courses offered in Finance.

• FIN 402 Capital Budgeting and Corporate Objectives
• FIN 411 Investments
• FIN 413 Corporate Finance
• FIN 423 Corporate Financial Policy and Control
• FIN 424 Options and Futures Markets
• FIN 425 Banking in Financial Markets
• FIN 430 Financial Institutions
• FIN 433 Cases in Finance
• FIN 434 Investment Management and Trading Strategies
• FIN 442 International Economics and Finance
• FIN 446 Financial Information Systems (same as CIS 446)
• FIN 448 Fixed-Income Securities
• FIN 501 Seminar in Finance (non-credit). A forum for the presentation of recent and current research. Faculty, Ph.D. students, and outside speakers present papers on their current research and/or discuss recent work by others in the field. Ph.D. students are expected to actively participate.
• FIN 505 Theory of Finance. Presents the theory of asset pricing and portfolio selection in multiperiod settings under uncertainty. The asset pricing results are based on three decreasingly restrictive assumptions: equilibrium, single-agent optimality and absence of arbitrage. These results are unified with two key concepts: state prices and martingales. The course also draws connections between these concepts and makes plain the similarities between discrete and continuous time models. For simplicity, all continuous time models are based on Brownian Motion. Applications include term structure models, optimal exercise of American options, portfolio choices and the pricing of corporate securities.
• FIN 511 Advanced Financial Economics (alternates with FIN 533, pre-requisites: FIN 402, 411, 413). The study of topics from the recent academic literature with emphasis on mathematical techniques that have been used to solve problems in portfolio theory, multiperiod asset-pricing models, and option-pricing models.
• FIN 532 Advanced Topics in Capital Markets (pre-requisites: FIN 402, 411). Consideration of empirical capital-market research not covered in FIN 411. Topics include tests of asset-pricing models, arbitrage pricing and multifactor models, tests of market efficiency, empirical work on the term structure of interest rates.
• FIN 533 Special Topics in Finance (alternates with FIN 511). Emphasis on the application of advanced empirical methods (e.g., GMM estimation, GARCH models, sample selection bias) to financial data. Topics include interest rates, inflation, and time-varying expected returns, and volatility.
• FIN 534 Advanced Topics in Corporate Finance (offered alternate years). This course examines the determinants and consequences of corporate financial policy choices.