Financial econometrics

This unit provides an introduction to the field of financial econometrics which draws on ideas and methods from finance, economics, probability, statistics and applied mathematics, and uses them to explain the complex world of finance and financial instruments. You will learn about different aspects of asset pricing, namely specification, estimation and testing of asset pricing models, including the capital asset pricing model and extensions. You will also learn how to decipher the statistical characteristics of financial data emphasising skewness, kurtosis and volatility aspects, and how to incorporate these in volatility models such as ARCH and multi-variate extensions. Further, you will apply these techniques to financial time series in real time (e.g. stock prices) and evaluate the forecast performance of these models.