Financial economics is the branch of economics concerned with the workings of financial markets, such as the stock market, and the financing of companies.
It attempts to answer questions such as:
- How are the prices of financial assets, such as shares and bonds, determined?
- What are the effects of a company choosing different methods of financing its operations, such as issuing shares or borrowing?
- What portfolio of assets should an investor hold in order to best meet her objectives?
In recent decades, a lot of work has concerned itself with the prices of derivative securities, financial instruments that derive their value from other, underlying, assets. Stock options are a classic form of derivative -- Fischer Black, Myron S. Scholes, and Robert C. Merton did ground-breaking work in the early 1970s on the determination of stock option prices on the basis of the underlying stock's price and volatility.
The work soon proved to have widespread applications, and helped inspire the creation of ever more complicated derivatives, (swaps, swaptions, etc.) which in turn has kept theorists busy building newer models.
The underlying point behind all the model construction is that of finding a value that arbitrage will enforce. Arbitrage is always a self-terminating activity -- it brings prices to a level at which it can no longer occur.
Key concepts used in financial economics include:
See also: Financial mathematics, Mathematical economics
