Open Yale Courses Financial Markets Lecture 1 Finance and Insurance as Powerful Forces in Our Economy and Society

Professor Robert Shiller: This is Economics 252, Financial Markets, and I'm Bob Shiller. Let me begin by introducing the teaching fellows for this course; and so I have them up here. We have five teaching fellows at this time and they're from all over. I like to put their pictures up so you'll know who they are. The teaching fellows are very international and that reflects my intention to make this a course that is also very international because finance is something about the whole world today, not just the United States. So we cover the world very well with our T.A.'s.

Usman Ali is from Pakistan, Lahore, and he graduated from the LUMS, Lahore University of Management Sciences. He's a PhD candidate now in Economics and he's doing his doctoral dissertation on stock analysts' recommendations and the relation to returns in the stock market. He's also interested in behavioral finance, which is the application of psychology to finance. The second teaching assistant — I see him right there, if you could raise your hand — Santosh Anagol, who is a representative of the United States, although he seems to have connections to India as well. He actually has a publication already in the American Economic Review on the Return to Capital with Ghana. He did this jointly with the Chairman of the Economics Department here, Chris Udry and he has spent time in India looking at the village economies. You were going to be giving away cows, did you do that?

Student: No, I'm still working on cows but we're not giving them away.

Professor Robert Shiller: Okay, that's the last time you'll hear about cows in this course. The idea was to give cows away to village farmers and to observe the outcome. It's a big change in some of these very poor villages to get a cow.

Christian Awuku-Budu is from Ghana, Accra, but he, again, went to college in the United States at Morehouse College. He is also a PhD candidate in Economics at Yale and he's been doing research on financial markets in developing countries.

Yaxin Duan is from China. She got her undergraduate degree from Nanjing University. No? You are from Nanjing, did I get a detail wrong? Where did you go to college? Okay, well I'm sorry about that. She is also a PhD candidate in Economics and is doing research on the behavior of options prices in a phenomenon called the "options smile," as she's smiling at me right now. She is also interested in behavioral finance, which is great to me because that's one of my interests. She is shown here standing precariously on a cliff. It makes me nervous to look at it overlooking Machu Picchu in Peru. She also loves astronomy, which is incidentally an interest of mine too, but you won't hear about it again in this course.

Finally, Xiaolan Zhou is our fifth teaching assistant and she's also from China, Hubei Province. She graduated from Wuhan University and is a PhD candidate in Economics at Yale. She is doing research on bank mergers.

Let me say, I've been teaching this course now for over twenty years and I'm very proud of all of my alumni. Many of them are in the field of finance. In fact, I like sometimes when I give — I give a lot of public talks. When I give a talk on Wall Street or even somewhere else in the world I sometimes ask my audience, "Did you take my course?" It's not infrequent that I'll get one or even two people raising their hand that they took Economics 252 from me. But I'm also proud of my alumni in this course who are not in the world of finance.