Behavioral Finance
Objectives
This course aims to get students acquainted with the field of finance where psychology and emotions are part of the decision-making process behind any financial or business decision, from a practical standpoint, with real life examples. Acknowledging humans are emotional and have cognitive limitations, this field of Finance blends psychology and finance to provide a new approach to the conventional traditional Finance school of thought. In this course the main objective is to introduce the human biases, explain their origins, show their evidence, and learn how to mitigate/minimize them. It will provide a framework that allows for the identification and best response to our human biases, from an investor or corporate decision-maker perspective, through a series of in-class experiments and real-life examples (hands-on approach). Behavioral Finance course is suitable for students seeking to have tools that enable out-of-the-box process of thought and mind reading to better perform their positions in financial markets or any other corporate finance work.
General characterization
Code
2281
Credits
3.5
Responsible teacher
Gonçalo Marçal De Sommer Ribeiro
Hours
Weekly - Available soon
Total - Available soon
Teaching language
English
Prerequisites
n/a
Bibliography
Behavioral Finance, Edwin T. Burton & Sunit N. Shah
Behavioral Corporate Finance, Hersh Shefrin
Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman
Teaching method
Papers: Several papers will be shared to provide insightful knowledge on specific topics. Together with the Books and class materials, these will be the sources of theoretical (quantified) knowledge that will create the base for open discussion. Class discussions: Good class participation consists of a constructive sharing of ideas and critical judgement on others comments/thoughts. Judging is allowed and even fomented, when fully rationally justified. Weekly Quizzes: A small quiz containing a few questions is going online weekly with questions about the previous week materials. The objective is to keep with the pace of the course and make sure everyone has the tools to perform consistently on class discussions. Case-study assignments: There will be two case assignments for this course. Case-studies will be about a broad range of themes while requiring students to have a full understanding of all the materials covered so far. The objective is for students to consolidate and bundle all the different pieces of knowledge that were introduced in class and apply them into a unique problem-solving framework. Combining several different lines of thought will be a challenge that stimulates critical thinking and judgment. Exam: The final exam will cover all materials given in class (from papers to handouts, while incorporating class discussions). It will consist of exercises on real-life situations and case studies solving.
Evaluation method
Weekly Quizzes (5%) In-class participation (10%) Case-study 1 (15%) Case-study 2 (20%) Final exam (50%)
Subject matter
Introduction and key concepts
Behavioral Finance Applied to Financial Markets
Behavioral Finance Applied to Corporate Finance