This course provides graduate students with an intensive review of the fundamentals of financial accounting and finance, as well as microeconomic concepts and quantitative skills needed as an appropriate foundation to pursue the Master of Science in Finance degree.

This course builds on the fundamentals of financial accounting and finance and provides an in-depth exploration of investments and corporate finance. Topics such as capital structure, the cost of capital, advanced capital budgeting, security valuation, and portfolio theory are covered.

This course uses an interdisciplinary approach combining international and corporate finance to build knowledge of international investment and valuation. This course teaches global financial decision-making through student collaboration and real-world applications.

This course explores decision-making theory to better understand why investors, money managers, and corporate managers make suboptimal economic and financial decisions. Specifically, the course focuses on the psychological, social, and cultural determinants of suboptimal investor and managerial behavior. A variety of behavioral “biases” are examined as well as the impact of those biases on security prices, corporate policies, and aggregate economic outcomes. In addition, the course investigates whether the mistakes generate market inefficiencies that can potentially be exploited.

This course introduces students to advanced corporate finance topics and builds directly on established concepts from prerequisite finance courses. The course integrates conceptual and applied case methodologies to develop practical solutions to real-world problems. Topics typically covered include working capital management, financial planning, optionality in decision making and hedging, agency theory, long-term debt management, leasing, and leveraged buyouts.

This course explores modeling applications for corporate finance and investment topics. Modeling financial problems in Excel is the standard way to approach in-depth analysis and understanding of complex problems. This course will look at several different types of models and financial applications. In addition, the class will explore financial options, futures, swaps, and financial engineering. It includes descriptive information, theory, and applications. The goal of the descriptive information is for students to gain familiarity with the instruments and the markets where they trade. Theory is covered to understand the instruments, their pricing, and behavior under different market conditions. Finally, applications of the use of derivative securities will be investigated in equity, fixed income, foreign currency, commodity, and credit markets.

This course provides a cross-disciplinary coverage of statistics and market microstructure. Students will learn how to use Excel to organize and present data sets to visualize the general characteristics, and how to identify and understand the use of specific measures of location and dispersion. We will cover the most important discrete and continuous probability distributions, and apply and understand the Central Limit Theorem.

Furthermore, we will calculate, use and interpret confidence intervals and hypothesis testing about the population mean and population variance. On the microstructure part, we will learn about the market structures used to trade securities, analyze the basic types of orders available to investors, and evaluate the risks and benefits of high-frequency trading and dark pools in financial settings.

The objective of this course is to provide an advanced theoretical and practical understanding of various investment choices. The first half focuses on stock portfolios. It covers the five key dimensions of the quantitative portfolio management process: Using signals (“factors”) to forecast returns; measuring risk; portfolio optimization; controlling costs, and performance evaluation. The second half focuses on a fixed income and alternative instruments, such as currencies, commodities, credit derivatives, and asset-backed securities. While covering each instrument, the course also addresses how macroeconomic, technological, labor market, taxation, and regulatory issues affect specific investment decisions.