Offered through: Business Administration
Terms offered: Spring 2017, Spring 2016, Spring 2015
The course discusses the basic theories of asset pricing. It begins with the standard discounted cash flow analysis, and generalizes this approach to develop the No Arbitrage Pricing Technique for security valuation. Topics will be fixed income securities, derivatives, contingent claims, basic principles of optimal portfolio theory, models of equilibrium asset pricing, including CAPM and related Factor Models.

Offered through: Business Administration
Terms offered: Summer 2017 10 Week Session, Summer 2016 10 Week Session, Summer 2015 10 Week Session
This course emphasizes the pricing of derivatives in continuous time, from the formulation of the pricing problem to the implementation of computational and numerical solution techniques.

Offered through: Business Administration
Terms offered: Spring 2017, Spring 2016, Spring 2015
This course reviews probability and statistical techniques commonly used in quantitative finance. It includes a review of normal, lognormal, CEV distribution, estimation and nonparametric techniques commonly used in finance (MLE, GMM, GARCH). Students will be introduced to financial databases and estimation application software to estimate volatilities and correlations and their stability.

Offered through: Business Administration
Terms offered: Fall 2017, Fall 2016, Fall 2015
This course reviews various aspects of equity and currency markets and their relative importance. It provides models of and historical evidence on the average returns and volatility of returns on equities, on the trade-to-trade equity price behavior, on trading volume and patterns, and primary financial risks. Determination of spot and forward rates and volatility, volume, high frequency dynamics and dealer behavior are examined.

Offered through: Business Administration
Terms offered: Fall 2017, Fall 2016, Fall 2015
This course examines risk measurement and management including market risk, credit risk, liquidity risk, settlement risk, volatility risk, kurtosis risk and other types of financial risks. Topics will include risk management techniques for different types of contracts and portfolios such as duration, portfolio beta, factor sensitivities, VAR, dynamic portfolio analysis and extreme value analysis and other risk management techniques.

Offered through: Business Administration
Terms offered: Summer 2017 8 Week Session, Summer 2016 8 Week Session, Summer 2015 8 Week Session
This course provides a quantitative approach to fixed income securities and bond portfolio management. Topics include fixed income security markets, pricing and uses for portfolio management or for hedging interest rate risk, bond mathematics, term structure measurement and theory, immunization techniques, and the modern theory of bond pricing, and derivative instruments.

Offered through: Business Administration
Terms offered: Fall 2017, Fall 2016, Fall 2015
This course will stress financial innovation in the traditional financial markets, and innovation opportunities in the newer disciplines of long and short term economic markets. Some examples of the later include livelihood insurance, home-equity insurance, inequality insurance, intergenerational social security, international agreements, and individual pension investment strategies.

Offered through: Business Administration
Terms offered: Spring 2017, Spring 2016, Spring 2015
This course reviews portfolio theory and pricing models. It includes: risk models for international portfolio returns, models of optimal allocation of funds, exchange rate uncertainty and criteria for judging the performance of managers and models; different types of portfolios/instruments, different types of applications, and strategies to achieve various investment objectives.

Offered through: Business Administration
Terms offered: Fall 2017, Spring 2017, Fall 2016
This course extends the study of fixed income securities to advanced topics on mortage and other asset-backed securities. Topics will include basic mechanics of structuring deals for mortgage-related securities, credit cards, leases, and other debt markets and the risk management techniques employed in the securitization process for these assets. The valuation of pooled assets and derivative bonds using Monte Carlo and option pricing techniques, and trading strategies are also evaluated.

Offered through: Business Administration
Terms offered: Fall 2017, Fall 2016, Fall 2015
Students will be required to complete an applied quantitative finance project that explores a quantitative finance problem that might be met in practice and involves the development or use of quantitative financial technique.

Offered through: Business Administration
Terms offered: Spring 2017, Spring 2016, Spring 2015
Students will be required to complete an applied quantitative finance project that explores a quantitative finance problem that might be met in practice and involves the development or use of quantitative financial technique.

Offered through: Business Administration
Terms offered: Fall 2017, Spring 2017, Fall 2016
This course proposes a guided tour through optimization models arising in practical finance. These problems include ones that are traditionally associated with optimization, including asset and liability management, asset pricing, and portfolio optimization. We also describe optimization models arising in model calibration, predication and estimation, and risk analysis. The course includes some recent approaches to the analysis of other kinds of financial data, such as text (financial news) data.

Offered through: Business Administration
Terms offered: Spring 2017, Spring 2016, Spring 2015
The course introduces the students to techniques from stochastic analysis employed in mathematical finance. Topics include: stochastic processes, brownian motion, stochastic integral, differentials and Ito's formula; martingales.

Offered through: Business Administration
Terms offered: Fall 2017, Fall 2016, Fall 2015
This course builds on the techniques learned in 230D, Quantitative Methods for Derivative Pricing. The focus is to gain a deeper analysis of numerical and computational issues in pricing and calibration. The orientation of the course is hands-on, with heavy use of computational techniques applied to case projects. The primary objective of this course is to prepare students to tackle the latest challenges in quantitative pricing that they are likely to encounter in cutting-edge financial institutions.

Offered through: Business Administration
Terms offered: Spring 2017, Spring 2016, Spring 2015
Over the last 25 years, psychologists have come to better understand the processes by which people make judgements and decisions. They have identified common judgement and decision heuristics and the biases associated with these. An understanding of one's own decision biases and those of others is an important tool for managers. Behavioral Decision Theory has also contributed to our understanding of financial markets. This course will discuss the common biases and heuristics.

Offered through: Business Administration
Terms offered: Fall 2017, Summer 2017 8 Week Session, Spring 2017
Advanced study in the field of finance engineering that will address current and emerging issues. Topics will vary with each offering and will be announced at the beginning of each term.

Offered through: Business Administration
Terms offered: Summer 2017 8 Week Session, Summer 2016 8 Week Session, Summer 2015 8 Week Session
Focuses on the techniques currently used to model credit risk. The course will cover default probabilities, loss given default, correlation, credit portfolio analytics, bond valuation, loan valuation, and credit derivative valuation. Emphasis will be placed on model building, model validation, and interpreting model output. Students will be required to do some high-level programming in a package such as Matlab. Some empirical testing exercises will also be part of the project work.

Offered through: Business Administration
Terms offered: Spring 2012, Spring 2011, Spring 2010
Introduction to credit risk modeling and conceptual overview of current techniques. Covers default probabilities, loss given default, correlation, credit portfolio analytics, bond valuation, loan valuation, and credit derivative valuation. Prepares students who are interested in a second course that will focus on model building. Students not interested in the technical details of modeling but who desire an understanding of how credit risk modeling is used in practice will benefit from taking this course.

Offered through: Business Administration
Terms offered: Fall 2017, Fall 2016, Fall 2015
Focuses on the techniques currently used to model credit risk. The course will cover default probabilities, loss given default, correlation, credit portfolio analytics, bond valuation, loan valuation, and credit derivative valuation. Emphasis will be placed on model building, model validation, and interpreting model output. Students will be required to do some high-level programming in a package such as MATLAB. Some empirical testing exercises will also be part of the project work.

Offered through: Business Administration
Terms offered: Summer 2017 8 Week Session, Summer 2016 8 Week Session, Summer 2015 8 Week Session
This course provides a framework to allow students the understanding of the accounting and tax issues related to derivatives and hedging. It also fulfills the needs of students seeking jobs in the corporate sector and/or seeking securities-structuring assignments in the financial services sector. A basic understanding of financial accounting is required.

Offered through: Business Administration
Terms offered: Spring 2017, Spring 2016, Spring 2015
This course introduces basic concepts of high frequency finance and discusses recent developments in market microstructure, electronic trading, and high frequency data modeling. Topics include trading basics and price discovery, distributional properties of financial time series, tick data analysis, trade direction algorithms, trading benchmarks, sources of risk, and trading strategies (including back-testing challenges, benchmark and hedging strategies, and arbitrage and program trading).

Offered through: Business Administration
Terms offered: Spring 2017, Spring 2016
This course is an introduction to the legal rules which govern financial markets and institutions in general but also, specifically related to derivatives. The main purpose of legal rules and regulations is to ensure a smooth functioning of financial markets, as well as the safety and soundness of the overall financial system. We will examine the main areas of law and regulation, as they pertain to the centralized exchanges and the over the counter markets and the role of regulatory arbitrage. We will specifically focus on Dodd-Frank and Basel III and how these rules came about as a response to the financial crisis. We will also explore the role of ethics in filling in the gaps that the law fails to fill.

Offered through: Business Administration
Terms offered: Fall 2017, Summer 2017 8 Week Session, Spring 2017
Individually supervised study of subjects not available to students in the regular schedule, approved by faculty adviser as appropriate for the students' programs.