75754 - Monetary and financial economics

Academic Year 2016/2017

  • Teaching Mode: In-person learning (entirely or partially)
  • Campus: Bologna
  • Corso: First cycle degree programme (L) in Economics and Finance (cod. 8835)

Learning outcomes

The course provides the tools for understanding deeply the basic models of financial and monetary economics. Specifically: i) the role of financial markets on resource and risk allocation; ii) portfolio theory and CAPM; iii) asset prices, risk and term structure of interest rates; iv) monetary policy transmission mechanism and its interactions with financial markets; v) sovereign debt monetization, financial repression and inflation.


Course contents

The course is structured in two parts.

Part 1: The Economics of Financial Markets

  • Intertemporal resource allocation, Risk allocation

  • Principles of Risk management

  • Portfolio theory and Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM)

  • Fixed Income:

  • Interest rates and returns

  • Maturity and volatility of bond returns

  • interest rate risk - duration

  • Risk and Term structure of interest rates

Part 2 : Monetary economics in economies with financial markets

  • Central bank balance sheet: static balance sheet, intertemporal balance sheet

  • Seignorage : modelling seignorage and limits to Seignorage (Laffer curve)

  • Monetary policy at work:

  • Instruments

  • Intermediate targets

  • Final targets

  • The mechanism of monetary policy transmission

  • The role of asset market liquidity in the functioning of the transmission mechanism : Empirical evidence

  • Asset market liquidity and monetary policy:

  • Quantitative easing

  • Qualitative easing

  • Evidence: Central bank balance sheets ante and post crises

  • Focus on the Eurosystem

 

 

 

Readings/Bibliography

Mishkin, F.S., K. Matthews, and M.Giuliodori,The Economics of Money, Banking, and Financial Markets - European Edition, Pearson Education Limited 2013

S. Benninga, Financial Modeling Uses EXCEL, The MIT Press

 

Teaching methods

Lectures in class, discussion of financial events

Assessment methods

Written exam


Teaching tools

Slides, PC, Websites of financial press and of Central Banks

 

https://sites.google.com/site/monetaryfinancialeconomics/home

Links to further information

https://sites.google.com/site/monetaryfinancialeconomics/home

Office hours

See the website of Gabriella Chiesa