Professor Shiller provides a description of the course, including its general theme, the relevant textbooks, as well as the interplay of his course with Professor Geanakoplos’s course “Economics 251–Financial Theory.” Finance, in his view, is a pillar of civilized society, dealing with the allocation of resources through space and time in order to manage big […]
Financial Markets with Robert Shiller (Video Series)
Risk and Financial Crises
Professor Shiller introduces basic concepts from probability theory and embeds these concepts into the concrete context of financial crises, with examples from the financial crisis from 2007-2008. Subsequent to a historical narrative of the financial crisis from 2007-2008, he turns to the definition of the expected value and the variance of a random variable, as […]
Technology and Invention in Finance
Technology and innovation underlie finance. In order to manage risks successfully, particularly long-term, we must pool large amounts of risk among many, diverse people and overcome barriers such as moral hazard and erroneous framing. Inventions such as insurance contracts and social security, and information technology all the way from such simple things as paper, and […]
Portfolio Diversification and Supporting Financial Institutions
In this lecture, Professor Shiller introduces mean-variance portfolio analysis, as originally outlined by Harry Markowitz, and the capital asset pricing model (CAPM) that has been the cornerstone of modern financial theory. Professor Shiller commences with the history of the first publicly traded company, The United East India Company, founded in 1602. Incorporating also the more […]
Insurance, the Archetypal Risk Management Institution
In the beginning of the lecture, Professor Shiller talks about risk pooling as the fundamental concept of insurance, followed by references to moral hazard and selection bias as prominent problems of the insurance industry. In order to provide an explicit example from the insurance industry, he elaborates on the story behind American International Group (AIG), […]
Barron’s Criticism, Determinants of Investment Return
This lecture is a guest lecture by Professor David Swensen, Yale University’s Chief Investment Officer. The starting point for Professor Swensen is an article entitled Crash Course, published in Barron’s in the wake of the financial crisis from 2007-2008. This article blames his endowment investment approach for a failure of diversification and an overemphasis on […]
Lecture 7 – Efficient Markets
Initially, Professor Shiller looks back at David Swensen’s guest lecture, in particular with respect to the Sharpe ratio as a performance measure for investment strategies. He emphasizes the empirical difficulty to measure the standard deviation, specifically for illiquid asset classes, and elaborates on investment strategies that manipulate the Sharpe ratio. Subsequently, he focuses on the […]
Lecture 8 – Theory of Debt, Its Proper Role, Leverage Cycles
Professor Shiller devotes the beginning of the lecture to exploring the theoretical determinants of the level of interest rates. Eugen von Boehm-Bawerk names technical progress, roundaboutness, and time preference as the crucial factors. Professor Shiller complements von Boehm-Bawerk’s analysis with two of Irving Fisher’s modeling approaches, the view of the interest rate as the equilibrium […]
Lecture 9 – Corporate Stocks
Professor Shiller emphasizes the worldwide importance of corporations by looking at World Bank data for corporate stocks as traded on global stock markets. He, then, turns his attention to the concept of a corporation, elaborating on the role of shareholders, the board of directors, and the Chief Operating Officer. He compares and contrasts for-profit and […]
Lecture 10 – Real Estate Finance
Real estate finance is so important that it has a very long and complex history. Describing the history of mortgage financing, Professor Shiller highlights the historical development of well-institutionalized property rights for mortgage contracts. Subsequently, he focuses on modern financial institutions for commercial real estate, elaborating on Direct Participation Programs and Real Estate Investment Trusts […]