List of Concentrations

Finance

The management of financial assets is important in all businesses. Finance describes how businesses raise the capital they need to start and sustain themselves, decide which projects make financial sense, and manage risks; how people invest in companies; and how financial markets work - how an economy allocates money to where it will have the most value.

In Chicago Booth's legendary finance curriculum, covering both corporate finance and investments, you will learn to evaluate risk and reward through an empirical lens. Our corporate finance offerings will prepare you at the business level: Should a company buy or build? Should they borrow money or issue stock? How should they compensate executives? Should they hedge costs, and if so, how? Investments courses prepare you to make decisions in financial markets: What determines stock and bond prices? How do you evaluate a fund manager? What financial risks carry big rewards, and how should an investor allocate his or her portfolio to take advantage of them? Through our culture of questioning and debate, you'll acquire a healthy skepticism that prompts you to look at each solution and probe for better explanations.

COCURRICULAR ACTIVITIES
COURSE SAMPLING
FACULTY SAMPLING

COCURRICULAR ACTIVITIES
You'll have the chance to explore operations outside the classroom in numerous ways that will also allow you to build new skills, relationships and networks. These include:

The Investment Banking Group

The largest student group on campus, the Investment Banking Group serves as a link between Investment Banks, Chicago Booth students, and Career Services. Their goal is to equip members with knowledge of the investment banking industry and aid in guiding them to a career in their area of interest. It is our mission to educate the industry about the specific strengths of Chicago Booth students and the Chicago Booth curriculum. Throughout the year, we hold various events to help educate students about investment banking and navigate the recruiting process.

Corporate Finance Group

The Financial Analysis and Treasury Group provides support to students pursuing a career in the field of finance within a company. The organization serves members with interests that cross various industries including financial services, high tech, entertainment, consumer products, healthcare, and energy.The group’s goal is to provide members with information on careers in Finance, assistance in their pursuit of such careers, and opportunities to meet professionals in the field. It also hosts the Road to CFO conference.

Bank Week

Bank Week provides students with an opportunity to visit banks in New York City during the week after the fall quarter ends. The IBG arranges for banks to host students for lunches, presentations, cocktails and other networking events. Students participate in informational interviews and those interested in Sales & Trading often arrange to sit on trading desks while in New York for Bank Week.

Hedge Fund Group

This group hosts guest speakers from the industry and seminars by Chicago Booth professors. The club also supports students in their recruiting efforts by cultivating industry contracts and assisting with resume preparation.

National IPO Challenge

The IPO Challenge showcases the nation's top business school talent competing to win a mandate to underwrite an initial public offering. First and second year MBA students from leading business schools around the country analyze the proposed offering, develop a structure and price for the transaction, and deliver their presentation to a Board of Directors, comprised of investment banking industry practitioners and leading professors. The structure of the competition is designed to simulate the analysis, preparation and delivery that investment bankers engage in when competing to win an IPO mandate.

COURSE SAMPLING
You’ll have the option of taking courses that address your individual career choices. Samples include:

Entrepreneurial Finance and Private Equity

The primary objective of the course is to provide an understanding of the concepts and institutions involved in entrepreneurial finance and private equity markets. We will explore private equity from a number of perspectives, beginning with the entrepreneur/issuer, moving to the private equity - venture capital and leveraged buyout - partnerships, and finishing with investors in private equity partnerships.

Portfolio Management

This quantitative course presents advanced material relevant for portfolio managers, extending the material covered in Investments. Topics include the money management industry (mutual funds, pension funds, hedge funds), modern techniques for optimal portfolio selection, liquidity and transaction costs, properties of asset returns, and investment strategies designed to exploit apparent violations of market efficiency.

Advanced Investments

One central theme the course examines is that asset pricing has undergone a sea of change in the last 20 years or so, with the realization that expected returns do vary across time, and across assets in ways that the static CAPM and random-walk view does not recognize. The course will cover a range of topics, including how stock and bond returns can be predicted over time; understanding the volatility of stock and bond returns; multi-factor models for understanding the cross-sectional pattern of average returns, such as value, growth and momentum effects; the size of the average market return and its relation to fundamental risks; optimal portfolios that reflect multifactor models, return predictability and hedging motives; advanced trading strategies used by trading desks and hedge funds; performance evaluation and benchmarks for funds; and liquidity effects and "bubbles" in stock and bonds.

Cases in Corporate Control and Governance

This course combines law and corporate finance to understand how shareholders try to monitor what public corporations are doing and control what happens to their investment. This course covers ownership and governance from a capital markets perspective. It will be taught using cases from recent years that cover topics such as: takeovers; tender offers, fairness opinions, lockups, staggered boards and poison pills; shareholder activism and proxy contests; squeeze-outs, dual class voting and other control structures for closely-held corporations.

Topics in Asset Pricing

This PhD-level course covers topics in the area of dynamic asset pricing, including standard complete market models, incomplete markets, portfolio constraints and transaction costs, learning and uncertainty, asymmetric information and other recent developments such as non-time additive preferences. The course will also cover selected topics in the area of derivative pricing and term structure models.

FACULTY SAMPLING
You’ll study with professors who conduct groundbreaking research, collaborate with the entrepreneurial and private equity communities, and bring their own entrepreneurial experiences into the classroom.

	John H. Cochrane, is a research associate and past director of the asset pricing program of the National Bureau of Economic Research and a Fellow of the Econometric Society. His recent publications include the book, Asset Pricing, and numerous articles on his research topics.		Tobias J. Moskowitz, was recognized by the American Finance Association with its 2007 Fischer Black Prize, which honors the top finance scholar under the age of 40. The award cited his "ingenious and careful use of newly available data to address fundamental questions in finance."
	Douglas W. Diamond, specializes in the study of financial intermediaries, financial crises, and liquidity. His work has appeared in such notable journals as the Journal of Financial Economics, the Journal of Finance, the Review of Economic Studies, the American Economic Review, and the Journal of Political Economy.		Raghuram G. Rajan, served as Chief Economist at the International Monetary Fund between 2003 and 2006. He is the author, along with fellow GSB faculty member Luigi Zingales, of the book, Saving Capitalism from the Capitalists. He received the inaugural Fischer Black Prize in 2003.
	Eugene F. Fama, is widely recognized as the "father of modern finance." Fama is among the most cited of America's researchers. He focuses much of his study on the relation between risk and return and implications for portfolio management.		Joshua D. Rauh, studies the ways in which corporations respond to incentives that are put in place by government policies. Rauh is a former associate economist for Goldman Sachs International in London. He was awarded the 2006 Brattle Prize.
	Milton Harris, is a fellow of the Econometric Society and a former president of the Western Finance Association and the Society for Financial Studies.		Ioanid Rosu, analyzes the liquidity of financial markets and works to understand its effect on asset prices and investor decisions. He has given talks at Stanford University, Princeton University, Carnegie Mellon University, the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Michigan, the University of California at Berkeley, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Hebrew University, Northwestern University, and the University of Toronto.