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:

Chicago Banking Club

The Chicago Banking Club furthers educational, networking and professional development opportunities in an effort to promote careers in investment banking.

Professionals Finance Club

The Professionals Finance Club seeks to enhance understanding of the financial industry; provide an environment for these students to share experiences with others interested in or working in finance related fields; and to identify career growth enhancers in finance for these individuals.

Training the Street Corporate Valuation Seminar

The main goal of the seminar is to assist candidates seeking employment on Wall Street and in the field of finance. Through practical examples and exercises, the seminar illustrates the fundamentals of popular valuation techniques used by Wall Street practitioners. The seminar also discusses applications of key valuation concepts such as EBITDA, Enterprise Value, WACC, accretion/dilution and LBOs.

Training the Street Two-Day Financial Modeling Seminar

This intensive workshop is designed to develop financial modeling skills through actual hands-on construction of a financial model. Each participant will build their own interactive financial model from “scratch” to practice blending accounting, finance and Excel skills.

India Business Week

You can investigate working in another part of the country or world and make networking connections. Many trips are designed to accommodate students who are employed full-time.

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.		Gregor Matvos, studies corporate finance and organizational economics. His paper, "Cross-Ownership, Returns, and Voting in Mergers," written with Michael Ostrovsky is forthcoming in the ,Journal of Financial Economics and has been covered in several media, including the Financial Times and US News and World Report.
	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.		Atif Mian, studies links between financial markets and the macro economy. He seeks a better understanding of how financial institutions intermediate economic activity, and how the nature of financial intermediation in turn shapes the macro economy. His work has emphasized the role played by political, governance, and organizational constraints in shaping the effectiveness and scope of financial markets in emerging markets.
	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.		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."
	Andrea Frazzini, had his PhD thesis, "The Disposition Effect and Under-Reaction to News," published in the winter 2005 issue of the Journal of Finance. It also won the PanAgora Asset Management Crowell Memorial Prize Competition for "the kind of research that is key in building our understanding of how the mechanics of learning behavior impacts the type and quality of information that can be observed in simple market setups."		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.