Financial economics is the branch of economics characterized by a "concentration on monetary activities", in which "money of one type or another is likely to appear on both sides of a trade". Its concern is thus the interrelation of financial variables, such as share prices, interest rates and exchange rates, as opposed to those concerning the real economy. It has two main areas of focus: asset pricing and corporate finance; the first being the perspective of providers of capital, i.e. investors, and the second of users of capital. It thus provides the theoretical underpinning for much of finance.
Real options valuation, also often termed real options analysis, applies option valuation techniques to capital budgeting decisions. A real option itself, is the right—but not the obligation—to undertake certain business initiatives, such as deferring, abandoning, expanding, staging, or contracting a capital investment project. For example, real options valuation could examine the opportunity to invest in the expansion of a firm's factory and the alternative option to sell the factory.
In finance, the binomial options pricing model (BOPM) provides a generalizable numerical method for the valuation of options. Essentially, the model uses a "discrete-time" model of the varying price over time of the underlying financial instrument, addressing cases where the closed-form Black–Scholes formula is wanting.
Employee stock options (ESO) is a label that refers to compensation contracts between an employer and an employee that carries some characteristics of financial options.
In corporate finance, capital structure refers to the mix of various forms of external funds, known as capital, used to finance a business. It consists of shareholders' equity, debt, and preferred stock, and is detailed in the company's balance sheet. The larger the debt component is in relation to the other sources of capital, the greater financial leverage the firm is said to have. Too much debt can increase the risk of the company and reduce its financial flexibility, which at some point creates concern among investors and results in a greater cost of capital. Company management is responsible for establishing a capital structure for the corporation that makes optimal use of financial leverage and holds the cost of capital as low as possible.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb is a Lebanese-American essayist, mathematical statistician, former option trader, risk analyst, and aphorist. His work concerns problems of randomness, probability, and uncertainty.
In mathematical finance, a Monte Carlo option model uses Monte Carlo methods to calculate the value of an option with multiple sources of uncertainty or with complicated features. The first application to option pricing was by Phelim Boyle in 1977. In 1996, M. Broadie and P. Glasserman showed how to price Asian options by Monte Carlo. An important development was the introduction in 1996 by Carriere of Monte Carlo methods for options with early exercise features.
A jump process is a type of stochastic process that has discrete movements, called jumps, with random arrival times, rather than continuous movement, typically modelled as a simple or compound Poisson process.
Sanford "Sandy" Jay Grossman is an American economist and hedge fund manager specializing in quantitative finance. Grossman’s research has spanned the analysis of information in securities markets, corporate structure, property rights, and optimal dynamic risk management. He has published widely in leading economic and business journals, including American Economic Review, Journal of Econometrics, Econometrica, and Journal of Finance. His research in macroeconomics, finance, and risk management has earned numerous awards. Grossman is currently Chairman and CEO of QFS Asset Management, an affiliate of which he founded in 1988. QFS Asset Management shut down its sole remaining hedge fund in January 2014.
Robert Alan Jarrow is the Ronald P. and Susan E. Lynch Professor of Investment Management at the Johnson Graduate School of Management, Cornell University. Professor Jarrow is a co-creator of the Heath–Jarrow–Morton framework for pricing interest rate derivatives, a co-creator of the reduced form Jarrow–Turnbull credit risk models employed for pricing credit derivatives, and the creator of the forward price martingale measure. These tools and models are now the standards utilized for pricing and hedging in major investment and commercial banks.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to finance:
Sugato Chakravarty is a visiting professor of management at Purdue University. He serves as Associate Editor of the Journal of Financial Markets.
Randolph Baer Cohen is an American financial economist and MBA Class of 1975 Senior Lecturer of Entrepreneurial Management at Harvard Business School.
In finance, momentum is the empirically observed tendency for rising asset prices or securities return to rise further, and falling prices to keep falling. For instance, it was shown that stocks with strong past performance continue to outperform stocks with poor past performance in the next period with an average excess return of about 1% per month. Momentum signals have been used by financial analysts in their buy and sell recommendations.
George S. Oldfield is a financial economist. He has been published extensively, and is cited for his work on the effects of a firm's unvested pension benefits on its share price published in the Journal of Money, Credit and Banking in 1977.
Menachem Brenner is a professor of finance and a Bank and Financial Analysts Faculty Fellow at New York University Stern School of Business.
Factor investing is an investment approach that involves targeting quantifiable firm characteristics or “factors” that can explain differences in stock returns. Security characteristics that may be included in a factor-based approach include size, low-volatility, value, momentum, asset growth, profitability, leverage, term and carry.
Catherine M. Schrand is an American academic and the Celia Z. Moh Professor of Accounting at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.
Jun Pan is the SAIF Chair Professor of Finance at the Shanghai Advanced Institute of Finance (SAIF) at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. She is an editor at the Review of Finance and an associate editor at the Journal of Finance.
Guido Baltussen is a Dutch economist who is professor in Behavioral Finance at Erasmus University Rotterdam and Head of Factor Investing and co-head of Quant Fixed Income at Robeco Asset Management.
