Spring 2025 Economics GU4860 section 001

BEHAVIORAL FINANCE

Call Number 13578
Day & Time
Location
TR 1:10pm-2:25pm
To be announced
Points 3
Grading Mode Standard
Approvals Required None
Instructor Harrison Hong
Type LECTURE
Method of Instruction In-Person
Course Description Prerequisites: ECON UN3211 and ECON UN3213 and ECON UN3412 Neoclassical finance theory seeks to explain financial market valuations and fluctuations in terms of investors having rational expectations and being able to trade without costs. Under these assumptions, markets are efficient in that stocks and other assets are always priced just right. The efficient markets hypothesis (EMH) has had an enormous influence over the past 50 years on the financial industry, from pricing to financial innovations, and on policy makers, from how markets are regulated to how monetary policy is set. But there was very little in prevailing EMH models to suggest the instabilities associated with the Financial Crisis of 2008 and indeed with earlier crises in financial market history. This course seeks to develop a set of tools to build a more robust model of financial markets that can account for a wider range of outcomes. It is based on an ongoing research agenda loosely dubbed “Behavioral Finance”, which seeks to incorporate more realistic assumptions concerning human rationality and market imperfections into finance models. Broadly, we show in this course that limitations of human rationality can lead to bubbles and busts such as the Internet Bubble of the mid-1990s and the Housing Bubble of the mid-2000s; that imperfections of markets — such as the difficulty of short-selling assets — can cause financial markets to undergo sudden and unpredictable crashes; and that agency problems or the problems of institutions can create instabilities in the financial system as recently occurred during the 2008 Financial Crisis. These instabilities in turn can have feedback effects to the performance of the real economy in the form of corporate investments.
Web Site Vergil
Department Economics
Enrollment 52 students (96 max) as of 10:06AM Thursday, November 21, 2024
Subject Economics
Number GU4860
Section 001
Division Interfaculty
Open To Schools of the Arts, Barnard College, Columbia College, Engineering:Undergraduate, Engineering:Graduate, GSAS, Global Programs, General Studies, SIPA, Professional Studies
Section key 20251ECON4860W001