FINAN 7801 - Foundations of Finance 1

The first course in a two-course sequence on the fundamentals of advanced financial economics. Topics can include: investment decisions under certainty and Fisher separation; decision making under uncertainty; expected utility theory; state preference theory; first-best risk sharing; complete markets; portfolio theory; theory and tests of the CAPM; arbitrage and the APT; empirical factor models; conditional asset pricing models; option pricing; the efficient market hypothesis; the EMH, information, and event studies; and introduction to partial equilibrium under asymmetric information, with initial treatment of moral hazard and the agency problem and adverse selection and signalling.