Lecture Slides in Financial Economics

Ed Dolan teaches global macroeconomics, managerial economics, money and banking, and other courses in several European countries. His blog features short articles relating to economics teaching, including news, data, examples, and illustrations. Each post has a link to a free set of PowerPoint slides that can potentially be used in teaching.

PDF Lecture slides, readings and a final exam from a four-week mini-course delivered at MIT in January 2016. The course introduces the economic theory of financial crises, focusing on "amplification mechanisms that exacerbate crises, such as leverage, fire sales, bank runs, interconnections, and complexity. It also analyzes the different perspectives on the origins of crises, such as mistaken beliefs and moral hazard, and discusses the optimal regulation of the financial system."

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.

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.

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.

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.

Sixteen Powerpoint files, shared as part of the TRUE project. Six are aimed at  year 2 undergraduates: they cover basic finance as the context for teaching financial market trading. The other ten are aimed at final-year economics students and postgraduate students of banking.