Finance is at the core of making informed business decisions. Columbia GSB’s finance division provides a complete finance training with a carefully integrated core curriculum and over 100 elective courses to train students to manage their own finances as well as for career success in asset management, investment banking, real estate, financial technology firms, management consulting, and for roles in central banks and government. Our
Taught by award-winning faculty from all areas of finance, our professors bring a combination of research-based insights, theoretical frameworks, and practice-based understanding to the classroom. The curriculum focuses on merging the theory and practice of finance along three dimensions: understanding finance principles, an ability to use state-of-the-art data-analytical tools, and a deep knowledge of financial markets and institutions.
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We present an equilibrium production economy in which default occurs in equilibrium. The borrower chooses optimal default and consumption policies, taking into account that default is costly and the lender gains access to the technology upon default. We derive asset prices and default premia in this economy. The borrower's relative risk aversion in wealth increases with decreases in wealth due to the increased possibility of default at low wealth levels. This produces a time-varying pricing kernel and a countercyclical equity premium.
Monte Carlo Methods are among the most broadly applicable and thus most powerful tools for valuing derivatives securities and measuring their risks. As computer speeds continue to increase and new research expands the scope and efficiency of these methods, their use is destined to grow. This book is devoted to the use of Monte Carlo methods in finance. Advances in Monte Carlo methods in financial engineering take place at the interface between academic research and industry practice. This book targets that interface developing theory closely tied to applications.
This study reports on the ex-post performance of survivor REITs and RECs over a 14.5-year period covering several business cycles. The results show that the systematic risk and risk-adjusted returns of REITs and RECs are quite different, especially during periods of low growth in real GNP. Relative to the overall stock market, survivor REITs, in particular, equity REITs, exhibited less volatility and higher returns than previous studies revealed.
Organizations private rms, government agencies, and non-pro t organizations can be modeled as networks of agents who are working together toward a common set of goals. Arrow (1974) views organizations as ways to overcome the limits of individual agents. By bringing together multiple workers, organizations can perform tasks that are outside the reach of any individual. While this creates production opportunities it also poses a challenge. In order to be productive, workers must coordinate their actions.
Many industries are dominated by large and very profitable firms. We develop a theory of firm dynamics, where competing firms operate a fixed-cost technology but due to customer inertia can only slowly build up a customer base. We show how the interaction between scale economies and customer inertia creates dynamic entry barriers and persistent performance differences.
Individuals behave differently when they know the objective probability of events and when they do not. The smooth ambiguity model accommodates both ambiguity (uncertainty) and risk. For an incomplete, competitive asset market, we develop a revealed preference test for asset demand to be consistent with the maximization of smooth ambiguity preferences; and we show that ambiguity preferences constructed from finite observations converge to underlying ambiguity preferences as observations become dense.
Earnings management involves actions by managers to influence reported financial results, often to present a more favorable view of company performance. In this chapter, we discuss the tools available to managers for earnings management. We first consider manipulation of net income through accruals and real earnings management. Then, we disaggregate earnings management along the income statement, comparing manipulation of revenue, expenses, and gains and losses.
In a monetary union, the risk-free rate cannot adjust to country-level fiscal positions, leaving only default spreads and convenience yields to respond. Empirically, we find that convenience yields explain a large share of the variation in Eurozone sovereign bond yields. Eurozone sovereign bonds earn larger convenience yields when their governments run larger surpluses. Since convenience yields generate substantial seigniorage revenue from debt issuance, our estimates imply economically large fiscal costs from low convenience yields for peripheral countries in the Eurozone.
