Online Text and Notes in Financial Economics

Part of the Open Yale website, this course website covers financial markets as taught by Robert Schiller of Yale University in spring 2008. The course strives to offer understanding of the theory of finance and its relation to the history, strengths and imperfections of such institutions as banking, insurance, securities, futures, and other derivatives markets, and the future of these institutions over the next century. The website includes audio, transcripts, syllabus, lecture slides and exams with solutions.

This page assumes a little prior knowledge of game theory but applies it to the context of investment, introducing the problem of optimal portfolio selection and concepts such as risk premium, volatility and sensitivity analysis. It has been produced by Hossein Arsham of the University of Baltimore.

Howard Davies sits on the International advisory councils of the China banking and securities regulatory commissions. In this lecture from October 2008, he is in in conversation with Professor Danny Quah from the LSE. Davies reviews the progress of reform in China’s financial markets, and the implications for the rest of the world. The conversation is available as a 90 minute audio podcast (mp3) with the accompanying website providing speaker notes and PowerPoint slides.

An Introduction to Investment Theory is an online textbook "designed for use in a four-week teaching module for master's students studying introductory finance", written by William N. Goetzmann of Yale University, School of Management. Eight chapters covering theories of financial investment decision, risk, portfolio selection, asset pricing, arbitrage, capital market efficiency. Assumes some basic statistical knowledge, but presentation mostly uses diagrams and simple algebra.

This large site contains 30 lessons in a tutorial explaining how demand and supply with the capital flow analysis model. Each lesson contains links and suggested readings. The site contains information on its bias, which it claims is toward a more conservative rather than liberal point of view, although it warns that even then the site may be unorthodox.

This complete set of materials for teaching income tax has been used in a second year undergraduate microeconomics course for economics specialists at the London School of Economics. The material could also be used in a public finance course. There are 107 Powerpoint slides, a worked example to support the lecture, a class activity involving student presentations (printable instructions for students and for lecturers) and some assessment questions.

PowerPoint presentation depicting decision-making under risk, showing how risk attitudes can be examined using choices among lotteries or willingness to pay for insurances. Shows how risk attitudes can be captured in convexity of the indifference curve or strict concavity of the utility function; and how risk aversion can be quantified by the ratio of second and first derivatives of the utility function, implying that it falls as wealth increases.

Course web site with note-form handouts and some assessment materials, from a 2007/8 course which "integrates modern theories of asymmetric information into the analysis of financial institutions, relating the theory to current developments."

This web page discusses an hypothesis and theory of the supply and demand securities and the behaviour of speculators. The document is hyperlinked to glossary terms elsewhere on the Investor Home site and to other sources on the Internet.