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Economics 395

Financial Economics

Spring 2002, Prof. Philip Ganderton

 

The world of finance ranges from personal finances to government finances.  From balancing your checking account to balancing the federal budget.  Such a wide range that it must be split into pieces to be studied.  This piece focuses on securities—financial assets that include stocks and bonds.

Financial Economics is the economic study of securities markets.  This course will introduce you to the models used to value securities, to determine what to buy and sell, and when.  It is the logical successor to Economics 212, Personal Investing.  But be warned—there’s mathematics ahead.  Nothing daunting, but some algebra, a little calculus and some statistics.  Just enough to understand more about the markets for stocks and bonds, and options and futures.

Whether you want to work in a corporate finance department, or simply decide if it’s a good time to change your retirement fund from growth equities to bonds, whether you’re a bull or a bear, or too shy to ask what an option is, this course is for economics students who want to better understand the financial markets.  It is not an investing class (that’s 212), but we’ll talk about investing all the time.  It’s not a corporate finance class, but we’ll be talking about debt/equity ratios.  It’s not public finance, but we’ll be talking about the federal debt and taxes.


New text book
The Economics of Financial Markets by H. Houthakker and Williamson, Oxford University Press 1996.
Priced at $45 from Amazon.com (click for direct link to book page)

The Graduate Assistant for this course is Wenxia Ying. You can contact her with your questions at:

Office hours: T, R: 2.00pm-3.00pm.
Email address: wxying@unm.edu
Office phone # 277 0176.
Office: Econ. Bldg, Room 1027.
 

Current articles of interest:

 

Check out the latest issues from our in-class discussions

 

Peruse the archive of general investing articles.

 

 

Worthy sites:

The Economist, obviously

Finweb (a source of internet resources on finance and economics)

The Journal of Financial Economics website

The Motley Fool (where only the most foolish investors hang out!)

Yahoo finance (where all the other investors hang out.)