Courses Taught by Robert J. Shiller

COURSES TAUGHT BY ROBERT J. SHILLER

Current Courses:

Financial Markets

An overview of the ideas, methods, and institutions that permit human society to manage risks and foster enterprise. Emphasis on financially-savvy leadership skills. Description of practices today and analysis of prospects for the future. Introduction to risk management and behavioral finance principles to understand the real-world functioning of securities, insurance, and banking industries. The ultimate goal of this course is using such industries effectively and towards a better society.

The course is broken into 7 modules:

Welcome to the course! In this opening module, you will learn the basics of financial markets, insurance, and CAPM (Capital Asset Pricing Model). This module serves as the foundation of this course.
In this next module, dive into some details of behavioral finance, forecasting, pricing, debt, and inflation.
Stocks, bonds, dividends, shares, market caps; what are these? Who needs them? Why? Module 3 explores these concepts, along with corporation basics and some basic financial markets history.
Take a look into the recent past, exploring recessions, bubbles, the mortgage crisis, and regulation.
Options and bond markets are explored in module 5, important components of financial markets.
In module 6, Professor Shiller introduces investment banking, underwriting processes, brokers, dealers, exchanges, and new innovations in financial markets.
Professor Shiller's final module includes lectures about nonprofits and corporations, and your career in finance.

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2011 Version of this course is available on Youtube and iTunes.

Narrative Economics

This course is relatively short and proposes a simple concept: we need to incorporate the contagion of narratives into our economic theory. You can think of narratives as stories that shape public beliefs, which in turn influence our decision-making. Understanding how people arrived at certain decisions in the past can aid our understanding of the economy today and improve our forecasts of the future.

Popular thinking heavily influences our answers to questions such as how much to invest, how much to spend or save, whether to go to college or take a certain job, and many more. Narrative economics is the study of the viral spread of popular narratives that affect economic behavior. I believe incorporating these ideas into our research must be done both to improve our ability to anticipate and prepare for economic events and help us structure economic institutions and policy. Until we better incorporate it into our methods of analysis and forecasting, we remain blind to a very real, very palpable, very important mechanism for economic change. Even in the dawning age of the Internet and artificial intelligence, so long as people remain ultimately in control, human narratives will matter. Maybe they will especially matter as the new technology exploits human weaknesses and creates new venues for narrative contagion. If we do not understand the epidemics of popular narratives, we cannot fully understand changes in the economy and in economic behavior.

The course is broken into 4 modules:

Part I introduces basic concepts and demonstrates how popular stories change over time to affect economic outcomes, including recessions, depressions and inequality as well as effective inspiration and growth. These stories can be observed from diverse sources such as politics, the media, or even popular songs.
Part II seeks to answer why some stories go viral, while others are quickly forgotten, by defining our narrative theory more firmly. This module enumerates and explores a list of seven propositions to help discipline any analysis of economic narratives.
Part III examines nine perennial narratives that have proved their ability to influence important economic decisions. They include narratives regarding artificial intelligence, stock market bubbles, and job insecurity.
Part IV looks to the future and highlights the opportunities for consilience in Narrative Economics. We share some thoughts about where narratives are taking us at this point in history and what kind of future research could improve our understanding of them.

This course offers only the beginnings of a new idea and a few suggestions for how it could be used by economists and financial professionals. The tone is not prescriptive or authoritative, as perhaps my Coursera course, Financial Markets, is in places. It represents the beginning of the journey (epidemic). This course is my way of floating the "germ" of this idea out into the broader community of not only professionals but of anyone who is interested in discovering how and why things become "important" to us as a society. I hope some of you will become infected by this idea, mutate it, spread it, and advance it. The beginning of the journey is the easy part. The challenge will come in taking these concepts to the next level. We have the tools to incorporate narratives into our research and the moral obligation to act; only the work remains.

Course Takeaways:

How and why certain stories go viral.
How viral narratives shape public beliefs and influence our economic decision making.
Learn to reapply research and insights from seemingly unrelated field to strengthen your economic thinking

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Past Courses:

Yale Economics 527a: Behavioral and Institutional Economics (Syllabus)

Behavioral economics incorporates insights from other social sciences, such as psychology and sociology, into economic models, and attempts to explain anomalies that defy standard economic analysis. Institutional economics is the study of the evolution of economic organizations, laws, contracts, and customs as part of a historical and continuing process of economic development. Behavioral economics and institutional economics are naturally treated together, since so much of the logic and design of economic institutions has to do with complexities of human behavior.

Yale Economics 116b: Introduction to Macroeconomics (Syllabus)

An introduction that stresses how the macroeconomy works, including the determination of output, unemployment, inflation, interest rates, and exchange rates. Economic theory is applied to current events.

Yale Economics 510a: General Economic Theory: Macroeconomics (Syllabus)

Analysis of short-run and long-run determination of aggregate employment, income, inflation, wages, and interest rates.Private consumption and investment behavior. Economic growth. Stochastic dynamic programming with applications to macroeconomics.

Yale Economics 525a: Advanced Macroeconomics I (Syllabus)

Heterogeneous agent economics, investment, scrapping and firing, nonquadratic adjustment costs, financial constraints, financial intermediation, psychology of decision making under risk, optimal risk management, financial markets, consumption behavior, monetary policy, term structure of interest rates.