Courses

The course introduces different approaches towards modeling the process of a financial asset price discovery in financial markets. The students will learn how investors’ characteristics — their risk perception and demand for stable or for exceptionally high return — influence equilibrium price formation, and why many models rely on representative investors. The students will study discrete modeling of financial assets’ prices in one or several periods, and will learn how to use continuous time models based on stochastic processes. The students will master navigation in risk-return dimensions and the art of choosing an optimal portfolio in the basis of assets’ characteristics and investor’s risk aversion. The students will also understand how derivatives’ prices are modeled and realize why one of the reasons of 2008 financial crisis was a wrong estimation of default probabilities on a number of such contracts.

The course provides a theoretical and empirical introduction to basic concepts of modern behavioral economics. Topics covered demonstrate some attempts to integrate various systematic departures from the standard assumptions in economics into formal models. A new class of models inspired by new insights from neuroscience is also discussed.

An important feature of this course is its combination of theory and practice. The students will learn about a wide range of issues within the scope of financial departments of a company. First of all, they will learn about corporate management and adaptation of best practices to specific needs to achieve company’s goals. The students will be able to determine minimal required rate of return on an investment project and a company as a whole, and master different tools for evaluating efficiency of investment projects. The students will study the theory of optimal capital structure and learn to use the theory in practical situations, as well as study main principles of the dividend policy and their influence on operational, investment and financial activities of a company. After this course the students will acquire skills to solve a broad range of problems related to financial side of company’s activities.

The course covers the basics of analysis and forecasting applied to the issue of population dynamics within a country. The students will learn about the main demographic processes (fertility, mortality, migration), including their indicators, factors influencing their dynamics, as well as gender differences. The students will also learn in details about the ageing process that is a part of a global long-term process of population changes that influences all parts of the society, including the economy. The students will discuss in details modern state of demography in Russia and forecasts of its development. After the course the students will understand the prospects of demographic processes development in Russia in comparison with developed European countries.

The course introduces basic principles of mathematical modeling of specific financial assets (derivatives) whose prices are related to another (underlying) asset. The students will learn the specifics of the main types of derivatives and their use in hedging operations. The students will master adaptation of mathematical models of underlying assets price dynamics to determine fair (rational) value of derivatives and study sensitivity of these value estimates to changes in the parameters of the underlying model. The students will also learn to recognize arbitrage opportunities when parities are broken.

This course is devoted to dynamic modeling of macroeconomic processes. The students will recall basic macroeconomic models of representative economic agents (consumers and producers) and will place them into dynamic context. They will master main macroeconomic dynamic models — overlapping generations model and Ramsey model. The students will learn to use these models to discuss fiscal policy issues and pension systems. The students will also master main models of endogenous economic growth (AK-model, Romer model, Barro models) and will grasp the general approach of economists to explaining the source of economic growth. Besides, the students will learn main models of business cycles — real business cycle models, models of political business cycle, new-Keynesian models — and will be able to use them in analyzing current economic situation.

The course provides an overview of basic microeconomic models describing different banking markets. The students will learn about the market structures that best describe banking markets, and how these structures are taken into account in banking regulation. The students will discuss models of interaction between banks and their clients with regard to deposits, and models of banks’ loans in the interbank market. A special bonus of this course is a survey of fresh empirical literature discussing most of the theoretical models discussed within the course.

The course aims to introduce basic notions related to modern financial system. The students will learn the differences between financial markets, financial institutions and financial instruments and how they jointly form the financial system. During the course the students will learn basic financial instruments and their specific features, will master basic financial calculations and understand the basics of forming investment portfolios. The students will learn about formal and shadow parts of the financial markets, about banking and non-banking institutions, and how regulators have to find the midway between regulation and freedom.

This short discipline prepares students for future advanced courses in finance. This discipline is devoted to the basic concepts used in financial mathematics: basic models of the financial calculations, in particular, discounted cash flows (DCF), net present value (NPV), internal rate of return (IRR) models. Knowing these models will help to understand how banks calculate loan payments, which payment schedule is more profitable, and way of calculation investment projects' efficiency or profitability of each money cash flow including cash flow from the ownership of a security. In addition, the course examines random flows of payments — this concept helps to understand the value of derivative securities.

The course in game theory introduces modeling principles for situations when agents influence each other through their actions. During the course the students will understand why leading mobile operators are unlikely to get monopolistic profits, why OPEC+ is not able to influence oil price for a lengthy period of time, and how to make good decisions in a war situation or in a family circle. The students will learn to make their choices accounting for the actions of people around them, and will understand why often the best choice is a random one, and why the majority choice is not necessarily the best one. The students will also learn why it is so difficult for people to come to an agreement, and how to create correctly working mechanisms for allocation of scarce resources in different spheres — from allocating government contracts to donor organs.

The course discusses issues of demand for health and healthcare services formation. The students will discuss how people’s behaviour influences their health and their readiness/willingness to keep it in good shape. The students will also learn how socio-economic profile influences person’s lifetime health and if it’s true that more educated people lead healthier lifestyle. The students will consider communication of people with healthcare system as a separate economic industry (the issue of patient-oriented behaviour of doctors we’ll leave to appropriate branches of science). The students will learn to model «health production» and demand for health (and, accordingly, for healthcare services). The students will master the use of available sources of information to measure health status and to identify socio-economic factors that influence health status. As a result of this course the students will be informed about inequality in health and healthcare access and about ways to decrease this inequality.

The course introduces students to the art of economic analysis of healthcare systems as an economic industry. The students will discuss how major agents in the field — the government, insurance companies, health care providers and patients — interact between themselves in their respective capacities. The students will learn about global tendencies of the population health accounting for changes in demographic structure, income and life style. The students will understand main issues of medical/life insurance — adverse selection and moral hazard — and will realize why some programmes of medical insurance come into force after a substantial lag. The students will master the art of economic evaluation of medical programmes and will understand main models of organization and financing of healthcare systems.

The course combines the modern theories with empirical evidence about the organization of firms and industries. In this course, we discuss the strategic behavior of firms creating and maintaining market power, imperfectly competitive markets, industries' contributions to economic welfare and government regulatory policy.

This course allows students to regularize and develop their knowledge of the open economy macroeconomics. This course discusses balance of payments as an indicator of the stability of the economy and as an indicator of the country's integration into the international financial system. Students will discuss the main theories of exchange rate determination, study how the choice of an exchange rate regime affects the effectiveness of monetary and financial policy, the ability of a country to borrow, and the stability of the financial sector. Students will also learn about several generations of models explaining financial crises.

This course provides an overview of the modern international trade theory based on microeconomic foundations. The students will recall Ricardian model of comparative advantage applied to neoclassical macroeconomic model and will realize which assumptions have to be changed in the modern world. They will learn a number of international trade models based on production factors, including models of specific production factors and the Heckscher–Ohlin model. The students will also master more recent models of monopolistic competition in international trade as well as with modern political economy branch accounting for international trade effects. The students will learn to forecast results of trade policy in different situations and their influence on social welfare.

The course discusses a number of issues related to the most dynamic transformation processes on the markets. These processes change the nature and structure of markets, producers and consumers, as well as regulation of the industries undergoing such transformation. According to this the course logically consists of several parts. The first considers redefinition of commodities and markets, describes new intermediaries — digital platforms — that might evolve into ecosystems. New business models and potential place for consumers and supplies within these models are discussed.

The second part of the course covers all these issues from the regulatory perspective. General approaches to regulation are discussed first, and then some specific cases are considered from the point of view of regulatory responses. Since regulation of digital platforms\ecosystems is presently developing, it is important to show the students the essence of the processes at the level of concepts as this allow for combining various regulatory measures and forecasting the results from their application. To provide the full context to the problems discussed the second part of the course has also two parts, considering specifics of platform economics in Russia as well as in main foreign jurisdictions (US, China, EU).

The course aims to introduce students to the major themes of economic history and development of economic thought as an integral part of the history of civilization. The students will learn why economic theories can be understood only in their historical context, and how economic development stimulates developments in economic thought. During the course the students will not only recall different historical events and facts, but will learn how to connect material manifestations of society's development (entrepreneurship, economic integration and external trade, development of finance and banking) with its spiritual culture (religion, philosophy, literature) with the help of analyzing economic development and economic thought. The end result of this course should be the habit to place any economic theory or model in an appropriate historical context.

This course helps to master the main principles of applying R programming environment to economic and financial problems. The students will learn the logic of the language, will gain an understanding of the major mechanics of navigation and selection of observations/variables. Besides, the students will learn how to transform and visualize the data so as to present their research results in the best possible way.

The course covers a range of issues related to investment projects valuation. The students will learn that such valuation can be done with the models for pricing standard financial contracts — specifically, options. The students will also master application of stochastic processes theory and methods of dynamic programming to account for uncertainty elements when planning for major components of investment cash flow — incomes and expenditures.

The course discusses different aspects of macroeconomic policy decision-making. The students will learn how macroeconomic policy is grounded in society’s demands, and why it is important to find out these demands in the best possible way. The students will discuss the problems that are encountered in different ways to aggregate individual preferences and will understand the substance of Arrow’s impossibility theorem as well as problematic issues of various voting systems. The students will discuss ‘government failures’ and their influence on economic policy decision-making, and how they might be taken into account when making actual policy decisions. The students will also recall main macroeconomic models and their policy prescriptions for different situations, and discuss how financial and economic crises reveal new problems. Finally, the students are expected to analyse macroeconomic policy of a chosen country during the course.

Macroeconomics analyzes the economy as a whole — at the level of a country or a region as opposed to studying separate markets. During this course the students will master the main notions and models of macroeconomics, will be able to explain economic decision of a Central Bank of a government, and will learn to consider consequences of any serious economic event from both short-run (what will happen in the nearest future) and long-run (what this means for our children and grandchildren) perspectives.

The course consists of two parts. The first considers main notions and models of macroeconomics for a closed-economy case (when there is no external trade). In this part students will learn about the Keynesian economic policy logic (active government spending during economic slowdowns) as opposed to neoclassical ideas of self-regulating markets. The second part of the course considers open economy models, limits of macroeconomic policy (how long can a country increase its government debt), as well as issues of economic growth and distribution. In all cases the students are asked to analyze real-life cases using the models they learn and to discuss economic news of the moment.

The course introduces to the students the basics of mathematical modeling of financial assets. The students will understand why financial assets are often modeled as stochastic processes, and how to estimate correctly risks corresponding to various financial assets. The students will learn how to determine a fair (rational) value of financial contracts and how to construct and analyze mathematical models of basic financial assets (bonds and shares). Finally, the students will learn how to check constructed models against real-life dynamics of assets in the financial markets.

The course aims to familiarize students with the main problems of mathematical statistics. During the course the students will recall the basic notions of the probabilities theory and will confidently explain why the probability of meeting a dinosaur on the Nevsky avenue is not equal to 50%. The students will learn why one person’s behaviour is very difficult to predict, but it is possible to forecast well behaviour of large masses of people. They will master the notions of false positive and false negative test results and will be able to interpret results of testing of any statistical hypothesis. Main topics of the course include: basic notions of the probabilities theory; sample and its characteristics; point estimation; general scheme of statistical hypotheses verification; confidence intervals; nonparametric criteria.

The course introduces students to methods of mathematical analysis of dynamic processes, including those that appear in economic settings. The students will learn how to describe and analyze in mathematical terms such processes as equilibrium price setting, economic growth, or population dynamics. The students will master how to determine stability of equilibrium in economic models, and will understand how the starting conditions influence the end result and divide countries into rich and poor. The course covers linear and non-linear equations and systems of equations, the use of phase diagrams in microeconomics and macroeconomics, explaining the nature of the solutions as well as stability analysis of both continuous and discrete dynamical systems.

This course is devoted to the optimization theory, i.e., the art of finding the «best» element from some set of available alternatives given some objective function. The students will learn that (almost) any economic problem can be presented as an optimization problem, and any result can be explained as a solution to a correctly stated optimization problem. The students will master qualitative analysis of the solutions to maximization and minimization problems, with a particular attention to the economic interpretation of the necessary first-order conditions for such problems. The course covers a range of issues concerning one-dimensional optimization problems, multi-dimensional unconstrained and constrained optimization, the Lagrange multiplier method, convex analysis, multi-objective optimization and the Kuhn–Tucker theorem.

The course offers students a thrilling excursion into the world of modern economic statistics. The students will learn why there are no ideal indicators, what simplifications are made during data collection, and how statistics is infiltrated with distortions and inaccuracies. On the basis of this knowledge the students will understand what should be taken into account when choosing indicators for empirical analysis, and how to interpret correctly results of such analysis. The students will consider several key examples — GDP, inflation, purchasing power parity, poverty, natural capital, human capital — and learn how statistical observation of various economic and social phenomena is organized, how raw statistical data are aggregated into economic indicators, and what are the possibilities and limitations of using these statistical indicators in applied economic analysis.

During the course the students will learn how to estimate panel data models and models with discrete and bounded dependent variable. The students will understand how to estimate the probability that an individual will choose a specific alternative, how to take into account that the sample might be biased because only economic agents with specific characteristics were selected, or how to estimate importance of various factors influencing the length of some phenomenon. Main topics of the course: maximum likelihood method, logit and probit models; models of ordered selection; Poisson model; negative binomial model; zero-inflated models; tobit models I and II. Besides, the students will learn about the possibilities of establishing causal relationships for non-experimental data (difference-in-difference method, instrumental variables method) as well as will understand better the methodology of empirical economic research, about potential of econometric models and the limits of their usage. The students will estimate all these models on real-life data using STATA software package.

Microeconomics studies in details how separate economics agents — individuals (consumers) and firms (suppliers) — function and communicate, and what results out of this communication. During the course the students will learn how to model economic agents’ behaviour — individuals maximize their utility accounting for their budget constraints and demand various goods and services, and firms maximize profits accounting for the resource constraints and supply goods and services. The students will be able to describe relations of consumers and suppliers within one market (partial economic equilibrium) for any market structure (from perfect competition to monopoly and oligopoly). The students will learn how to describe relations between different markets within a model of general economic equilibrium and the role of the invisible hand of the market in this process. After the course the students will be able to explain why OPEC can enforce its interests onto the market, what is the economic solution to the noisy neighbours, and why quarantine during an epidemic should be a government-led option.

The course discusses the notion of risk and its use in finance. The students will learn the difference between risk and uncertainty, and will master the main methods of risk estimation. The students will understand the sources of such risk types as market risk, credit risk, and operational risk, and will learn main ways to manage these risks. The students will study main principles of modern financial regulation and will understand why Central banks of almost all countries became recently megaregulators responsible not only for the banking system, but also for insurance and — wider — financial markets. The students will also discuss main principles of financial supervision systems in relation to banking and insurance segments of financial system.

The course introduces various issues in insurance risk evaluation. The students will learn about the main ways to model asset dynamics of an insurance company, and will learn how to use assessment of ruin probability as a general risk characteristic. The students will study in details the equation describing the ruin probability and will learn how to assess sensitivity of results to changes in the initial parameters. They will also learn to evaluate the current risk of financial position of an insurance company in relation to specific types of insurance (in particular, insurance of drivers' responsibility).