Finance is the study and discipline of money, currency and capital assets. It is related to, but not synonymous with economics, which is the study of production, distribution, and consumption of money, assets, goods and services . Finance activities take place in financial systems at various scopes, thus the field can be roughly divided into personal, corporate, and public finance.
Robert Cox Merton is an American economist, Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences laureate, and professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, known for his pioneering contributions to continuous-time finance, especially the first continuous-time option pricing model, the Black–Scholes–Merton model. In 1997 Merton together with Myron Scholes were awarded the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel for the method to determine the value of derivatives.
Monetary economics is the branch of economics that studies the different theories of money: it provides a framework for analyzing money and considers its functions, and it considers how money can gain acceptance purely because of its convenience as a public good. The discipline has historically prefigured, and remains integrally linked to, macroeconomics. This branch also examines the effects of monetary systems, including regulation of money and associated financial institutions and international aspects.
Financial engineering is a multidisciplinary field involving financial theory, methods of engineering, tools of mathematics and the practice of programming. It has also been defined as the application of technical methods, especially from mathematical finance and computational finance, in the practice of finance.
Imperial College Business School is the graduate business school of Imperial College London. The business school was opened by Queen Elizabeth II.
Financial modeling is the task of building an abstract representation of a real world financial situation. This is a mathematical model designed to represent the performance of a financial asset or portfolio of a business, project, or any other investment.
A master's degree in quantitative finance concerns the application of mathematical methods to the solution of problems in financial economics. There are several like-titled degrees which may further focus on financial engineering, computational finance, mathematical finance, and/or financial risk management.
Moorad Choudhry was formerly Head of Business Treasury, Global Banking and Markets at Royal Bank of Scotland.
Andrew Wen-Chuan Lo is the Charles E. and Susan T. Harris Professor of Finance at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Lo is the author of many academic articles in finance and financial economics. He founded AlphaSimplex Group in 1999 and served as chairman and chief investment strategist until 2018 when he transitioned to his current role as chairman emeritus and senior advisor.
Markus Konrad Brunnermeier is an economist, who is the Edwards S. Sanford Professor of Economics at Princeton University.
Jean-Philippe Bouchaud is a French physicist. He is co-founder and chairman of Capital Fund Management (CFM), adjunct professor at École Normale Supérieure and co-director of the CFM-Imperial Institute of Quantitative Finance at Imperial College London. He is a member of the French Academy of Sciences, and held the Bettencourt Innovation Chair at Collège de France in 2020.
Basel III is the third Basel Accord, a framework that sets international standards for bank capital adequacy, stress testing, and liquidity requirements. Augmenting and superseding parts of the Basel II standards, it was developed in response to the deficiencies in financial regulation revealed by the financial crisis of 2007–08. It is intended to strengthen bank capital requirements by increasing minimum capital requirements, holdings of high quality liquid assets, and decreasing bank leverage.
Quantitative analysis is the use of mathematical and statistical methods in finance and investment management. Those working in the field are quantitative analysts (quants). Quants tend to specialize in specific areas which may include derivative structuring or pricing, risk management, investment management and other related finance occupations. The occupation is similar to those in industrial mathematics in other industries. The process usually consists of searching vast databases for patterns, such as correlations among liquid assets or price-movement patterns.
Jon Danielsson is an economist teaching at the London School of Economics and active in domestic and international policy debates. He received his PhD in the economics of financial markets from Duke University in 1991.
Douglas Warren Diamond is an American economist. He is currently the Merton H. Miller Distinguished Service Professor of Finance at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, where he has taught since 1979. Diamond specializes in the study of financial intermediaries, financial crises, and liquidity. He is a former president of the American Finance Association (2003) and the Western Finance Association (2001-02).
Mathematical finance, also known as quantitative finance and financial mathematics, is a field of applied mathematics, concerned with mathematical modeling of financial markets.
Thomas Philippon is a French economist and professor of finance at the New York University Stern School of Business.
Linda L. Tesar is a professor of economics and director of graduate studies at the University of Michigan College of Literature, Science, and the Arts (LSA), the liberal arts and sciences school of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. She is also a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and the Editor-in-Chief of the IMF Economic Review. She has been a visitor in the Research Departments of the International Monetary Fund, the Federal Reserve Board of Governors and the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. In the past, she has also served on the academic advisory council to the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. From 2014 to 2015, Tesar served as Senior Economist on the Council of Economic Advisers.
Mara Faccio is an economist and currently the Duke Realty Chair in Finance and Professor of Finance at the Krannert School of Management at Purdue University.
Geert Bekaert is a Belgian economist. He is a professor at Columbia Business School and the managing editor of the Journal of Banking and Finance.
