sort by: Relevancy | Title try advanced search for more options
Early Modern England: Politics, Religion, and Society under the Tudors and Stuarts (HIST 251)In this lecture, Professor Wrightson discusses the transformation of the English state in the twenty years following the Glorious Revolution of 1688. He examines the ambiguities of the Revolutionary Settlement which placed authority in William III and Mary II following the deposition/abdication of James II, and the manner in which parliamentary gov...more
Capitalism: Success, Crisis and Reform (PLSC 270) Professor Rae explains how the growing scale and complexity of railroads in the US were foundational to the development of modern capitalism. Operating the railroad system required professional managers and new management techniques, and the scale of railroad financing gave rise to the formation of the joint stock corporation. Professor Rae then discusses how different forms of company own...more
In order for Social Security to work, people have to believe there's some possibility that the world will last forever, so that each old generation will have a young generation to support it. The overlapping generations model, invented by Allais and Samuelson but here augmented with land, represents such a situation. Financial equilibrium can again be reduced to general equilibrium. At first glance it would seem that the model requires a s...more
The Harlem Renaissance brought together legions of black writers, artists, musicians, and intellectuals who celebrated black culture and romanticized its connections to an African past. In this lecture, Professor Holloway documents some of the expressions of the Harlem Renaissance (also known as the New Negro Renaissance), the political and cultural movement that claimed Harlem as its figurative capital. In fact, thousands of African Ameri...more
Co-sponsored by Gray Ghost Ventures and Omidyar Network Thursday, March 22, 2012 While starting any new company is challenging, there is a unique set of tough decisions for the entrepreneur working to solve the world's greatest social problems. After all, social ventures are often established to address issues that neither governments nor markets naturally seem to solve. Panelists addressed how they've managed decisions regarding raising ...more
Until now, the models we've used in this course have focused on the case where everyone can perfectly forecast future economic conditions. Clearly, to understand financial markets, we have to incorporate uncertainty into these models. The first half of this lecture continues reviewing the key statistical concepts that we'll need to be able to think seriously about uncertainty, including expectation, variance, and covariance. We apply these...more
Inspired by Charles Lindberg's Spirit of St. Louis, X PRIZE founder and space entrepreneur Peter Diamandis explains to interviewer George Zachary of Charles River Ventures that offering a high profile cash reward can often be more financially advantageous - and more aggressive in moving forward a societal push - than simply funding a good idea. Diamandis describes his incredible quest for funding, pitching hundreds of potential benefactors...more
2008-2009 saw an unprecedented restructuring of the financial markets, including the market for angel and venture capital. Our panel of expert angel and venture capital investors looks at technology investing during the past year, the current market, and what the future investment environment holds. The presentation also includes a review of the key metrics for venture capital investments/exits and critical VC term sheet terms for Q2 2009....more
Until now we have ignored risk aversion. The Bernoulli brothers were the first to suggest a tractable way of representing risk aversion. They pointed out that an explanation of the St. Petersburg paradox might be that people care about expected utility instead of expected income, where utility is some concave function, such as the logarithm. One of the most famous and important models in financial economics is the Capital Asset Pricing Mod...more
This lecture explains what an economic model is, and why it allows for counterfactual reasoning and often yields paradoxical conclusions. Typically, equilibrium is defined as the solution to a system of simultaneous equations. The most important economic model is that of supply and demand in one market, which was understood to some extent by the ancient Greeks and even by Shakespeare. That model accurately fits the experiment from the last...more
Technology and innovation underlie finance. In order to manage risks successfully, particularly long-term, we must pool large amounts of risk among many, diverse people and overcome barriers such as moral hazard and erroneous framing. Inventions such as insurance contracts and social security, and information technology all the way from such simple things as paper, and the postal service to modern computers have helped to manage risks and ...more
While economists didn't have a good theory of interest until Irving Fisher came along, and didn't understand the role of collateral until even later, Shakespeare understood many of these things hundreds of years earlier. The first half of this lecture examines Shakespeare's economic insights in depth, and sees how they sometimes prefigured or even surpassed Irving Fisher's intuitions. The second half of this lecture uses the concept of pre...more
