This Capital Markets course has three goals:
- 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.
- To introduce the following concepts: arbitrage, the term structure of interest rates, equilibrium pricing, diversification, the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM), efficient and inefficient markets, performance evaluation, and derivative securities, particularly options.
- To provide sufficient background knowledge for students seeking an overview of capital markets and an introduction to advanced finance courses.
About Instructor:
Michaela Pagel is the Roderick H. Cushman Associate Professor of Business at Columbia Business School. She received her Ph.D. from the Economics Department at UC Berkeley and works on topics in behavioral economics, household finance, and macroeconomics. Her dissertation focused on the consumption and investment implications of non-standard preferences.
More specifically, she theoretically studied how decision-making is affected by people’s beliefs about their consumption. Her current work analyzes transaction-level data on income, spending, balances, credit limits, and logins stemming from a financial aggregation app. Furthermore, she is working with bank account data linked to individual investors’ security trades and portfolios.