Courses

Teaching

Econ 119: Principles of Economics

Course Description: This class provides a foundation in economic theory and addresses many major topics in economics. The first part of the course covers microeconomics. Here we focus on the economic decisions of individual households, workers and firms and how these decisions interact in markets. The second part of the course covers macroeconomics. Here, we focus on the study of economic aggregates (e.g., GDP, inflation, and unemployment) and the forces that cause them to change over time.

Econ 356: Capital Markets

Course Description: This course is intended to provide students with basic financial markets concepts and principles. It mainly covers several major financial markets including money market, bond market, stock market, foreign exchange market, mortgage market, future and forward market, option market and other financial derivative markets. For each market, we focus on basic concepts, market structure, price discovery process, players, techniques to analyze the market and factors that affect price of financial instrument.

Econ 394: Modern China’s Economy

Course Description: In the past three decades, China is one of the most dynamic and fastest growing countries in the world. Why has China been growing so fast in the last three decades? What are the keys to develop a successful business in China? How does the emergence of China affect the world economy? This course is designed to answer the above questions using a general framework developed for the Chinese economy. China remains a communist country with a significant legacy of a command economy. But it is also a market economy. Understanding this mixture – capitalism with Chinese characters – is a major aim of this course.

Econ 457: Finance

Course Description: This course is intended to provide students with basic financial management concepts and principles. It mainly covers corporate finance and some part of asset pricing. These fundamentals will help you to understand what capital funds the business needs, how these funds are obtained, and how they are managed. This course is highly quantitative and many of the analyses rely on calculations. But, with an understanding of basic algebra, you should be able to do reasonably well by practicing problems at the end of the text.

Econ 485: Empirical Finance

Course Description: This class teaches students how to profit from financial markets based on quantitative analysis. The course mainly covers stock and foreign exchange markets, in which fundamental and technical analyses are conducted to forecast asset prices and design trading strategies. The strategies are scientifically back-tested in Matlab and applied in simulated trading for real performance evaluation. To accommodate different backgrounds of the students, basic concepts of linear algebra and Matlab coding are introduced in the beginning of the class.