The course will acquaint you modern international capital markets. You can expect to learn a substantial amount of up-to-date detail and some useful theory. Specifically, we will survey global markets for credit, equity, foreign exchange, foreign exchange derivatives, futures, interest rate swaps, credit default swaps and asset backed securities. In each case, we will learn the highlights of payments and settlement, documentation, regulation, applications for end-users, related economic theory and pricing models. The class will cover options and asset pricing theory; however, the treatment will be informal and designed to help develop intuition. One lecture each will be devoted to international banking (with an emphasis on changing capital regulation), investment banks, and hedge funds.
Lagrangian density formalism of Lorentz scalar, Dirac and Weyl spinor, and vector gauge fields. Action variations, symmetries, conservation laws. Canonical quantization, Fock space. Interacting local fields, temporal evolution. Wicks theorem, propagators, and vertex functions, Feynman rules and diagrams. Scattering S matrix examples with tree level amplitudes. Path quantization. 1-loop intro to renormalization.
Prerequisites: INAF U6072 or INAF U6680 or SUMA K4155
This course provides an interdisciplinary perspective on global oil and gas activity by examining how international oil companies assess and manage risk, and how they deal with an uncertain (i.e., unpredictable) future. An innovative approach to dealing with uncertainty, the scenario methodology, is used to construct a range of plausible future outcomes resulting from the interaction of market, sovereign, and other variables. The first section of the course covers the theoretical aspects of corporate organization, risk, uncertainty, and geopolitical analysis. The second section covers the governmental aspects of oil and gas activity and how operating "regimes" are developed and maintained. The final section looks at several specific investment projects.
Key question: How to harmonize the diverse objectives of private investors, public sector officials, multilateral institutions and other key actors in the development of international infrastructure projects. This course will examine the principles underlying global infrastructure investment and explore effective strategies to encourage development of facilities for transportation, water, energy, healthcare and education. The classes will focus primarily upon three or more specific case studies of recent projects. Subjects of examination will include Linha Quatro of the Metrô de São Paulo, the Kenya-Uganda Rift Valley Railway and the Guangdong Province water system. The projects will be examined from the perspectives of financial investors, industrial operators, creditors, including commercial banks and multilateral institutions, government policymakers and the public. Issues discussed will include risk allocation, delivery methods and the evolving cast of global investors.
This graduate seminar will expose students to major themes and issues in the study of South Asia. The course will provide a serious intellectual foundation for students wishing to pursue specialized, directed research in the region. Themes for consideration will include cultural history and early modernity; capitalism and political economy; genealogies of political thought; anticolonialism; caste and religion; and gender and feminist history.
The electricity sector worldwide is changing more rapidly today than at any period since the inception of the industry. Billions of dollars of new investment will be required over the next decade to maintain and improve electricity service, particularly in emerging economies. Models of service delivery are changing, and the role of the traditional regulated utility continues to evolve. This class is designed to provide a full exposure to current issues across the electricity value chain, including both regulated and competitive sectors. In addition, it is intended to provide insights that are applicable to other industries, including infrastructure financing, maintaining competition in markets, structuring good governance arrangements, and promoting economic efficiency.
Prerequisites: Familiarity with Corporate Finance
The global energy industry is comprised of the largest and most interrelated set of businesses in the world. From its inception, the industry has grown dramatically to provide ever increasing amounts of energy and power to commercial, industrial and retail consumers around the world. Given its unique industry structure, specialized financing techniques have been developed to expand and/or complement conventional public and private financing alternatives. These specialized financing approaches have, in turn, allowed the energy industry to access an unprecedented range of capital sources to finance its increasingly complex and challenging business model.
The module will take a hands-on approach to the design, communication and political implementation of economic policies. Issues will include designing policy reforms; agenda-setting; choosing the timing of policy initiatives; big-bang versus gradual reforms; the use of research, expert committees and blue-ribbon commissions; agenda-setting and coalition-building; attaining and maintaining the credibility of policies and policymakers; announcing and communicating policy initiatives; the role of the ideology and beliefs of voters; and relationships with the media. With some academic literature as background, we will focus on the challenges of real-life policy reforms and the lessons they offer. Several examples will be taken from recent Latin American experiences with policy reform.
Prerequisites: some familiarity with the basic principles of partial differential equations, probability and stochastic processes, and of mathematical finance as provided, e.g., in
MATH W4071
.
Review of the basic numerical methods for partial differential equations, variational inequalities and free-boundary problems. Numerical methods for solving stochastic differential equations; random number generation, Monte Carlo techniques for evaluating path-integrals, numerical techniques for the valuation of American, path-dependent and barrier options.