NOTE: This course is required for enrollment in most upper-level finance courses (8300 and 9300) and must be taken prior to or concurrently with any upper-level finance course. It is not required for upper-level economics courses (8200 and 9200).

This Capital Markets course has three goals:

1.    To introduce the principles of asset valuation from an applied perspective.   The majority of the class is concerned with the valuation of financial securities. The valuation issues to be discussed are heavily used in portfolio management and risk management applications.

2.    To introduce the following concepts: arbitrage, the term structure of interest rates, equilibrium pricing, diversification, the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM), efficient and inefficient markets, performance evaluation, and derivative securities, particularly options.

3.    To provide sufficient background knowledge for students seeking an overview of capital markets and an introduction to advanced finance courses.

Michaela Pagel

Roderick H. Cushman Associate Professor of Business

Michaela Pagel is the Roderick H. Cushman Associate Professor of Business at Columbia Business School. She received her Ph.D. from the Economics Department at UC Berkeley and works on topics in behavioral economics, household finance, and macroeconomics. Her dissertation focused on the consumption and investment implications of non-standard preferences. More specifically, she theoretically studied how decision-making is affected by people's beliefs...

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