Financial Economics (L1095)

15 credits, Level 6

Autumn teaching

You are given an advanced perspective on the microeconomic principles underlying financial markets and financial decision-making.

You learn key concepts including:

• risk and return
• asset pricing
• asset allocation
• portfolio optimisation
• financial market equilibrium
• efficient market hypothesis. 

You also look at arbitrage pricing and pricing of options and futures, and how these can be used to understand investment decisions, and trends in financial markets. 

You must have knowledge of microeconomics, basic calculus, and statistics - and be familiar with using spreadsheet packages such as Microsoft Excel. This is for solving problem sets and developing your analytical techniques in valuation and portfolio optimisation.

Contact hours and workload

This module is approximately 150 hours of work. This breaks down into about 32 hours of contact time and about 118 hours of independent study. The University may make minor variations to the contact hours for operational reasons, including timetabling requirements.

We regularly review our modules to incorporate student feedback, staff expertise, as well as the latest research and teaching methodology. We’re planning to run these modules in the academic year 2024/25. However, there may be changes to these modules in response to feedback, staff availability, student demand or updates to our curriculum.

We’ll make sure to let you know of any material changes to modules at the earliest opportunity.