Financial Economics

MAN 525 builds the theoretical scaffolding behind how prices form in financial markets when investors face uncertainty, working entirely in discrete time so the math stays tractable while the economic logic does the heavy lifting. You'll move from expected utility and risk aversion through stochastic dominance and mean-variance analysis up to the equilibrium pricing models (CAPM, ICAPM, APT) and what breaks once markets become incomplete, with most of the work happening through close reading and critique of foundational research papers plus a written analysis and presentation of your own. It's the asset-pricing backbone that empirical finance, corporate finance, and derivatives coursework all draw on, so it pays off anywhere your later work needs to argue why an asset is worth what it's worth.