Take a Free Course on the Financial Markets with Robert Shiller, Winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics

This morn­ing, the Nobel Prize in Eco­nom­ic Sci­ence went to three Amer­i­can pro­fes­sors — Eugene F. Fama (U. Chica­go), Lars Peter Hansen (U. Chica­go) and Robert J. Shiller (Yale) — “for their empir­i­cal analy­sis of asset prices.” In his own way, each econ­o­mist has demon­strat­ed that “stock and bond prices move unpre­dictably in the short term but with greater pre­dictabil­i­ty over longer peri­ods,” and that mar­kets are “moved by a mix of ratio­nal cal­cu­lus and human behav­ior,” writes The New York Times.

Of the three econ­o­mists, Robert Shiller is per­haps the most house­hold name. In March 2000, Shiller pub­lished Irra­tional Exu­ber­ance, a book that warned that the long-run­ning bull mar­ket was a bub­ble, that stock prices were being dri­ven by human psy­chol­o­gy, not real val­ues. Weeks lat­er, the mar­ket cracked and peo­ple began to pay atten­tion to what Shiller had to say. Fast for­ward a few years, and Shiller released a sec­ond edi­tion of the same book, this time argu­ing that the hous­ing mar­ket was the lat­est and great­est bub­ble. We all know how that pre­dic­tion played out.

Shiller’s think­ing about the finan­cial mar­kets isn’t a mys­tery. It’s all on dis­play in his Yale course sim­ply called Finan­cial Mar­kets. Avail­able for free on YouTube, iTunes Video, and  Yale’s web site, the 23 lec­ture-course pro­vides an intro­duc­tion to “behav­ioral finance prin­ci­ples” nec­es­sary to under­stand the func­tion­ing of the secu­ri­ties, insur­ance, and bank­ing indus­tries. Record­ed in 2011, the course is oth­er­wise list­ed in the Eco­nom­ics sec­tion of our col­lec­tion of 1200 Free Online Cours­es. You can watch all of the lec­tures above, start­ing with Lec­ture 1. By fol­low­ing these links, you can find the course syl­labus, an out­line of the week­ly ses­sions, and a book list.

Per­son­al Note: About 10 years ago, I worked with Prof. Shiller on devel­op­ing an online course. Two things I recall about him. First, he struck me as being a very down-to-earth and unas­sum­ing guy. A plea­sure to work with. Sec­ond, we had some time to kill one day, and so I asked him (cir­ca 2005) whether it was crazy to buy a house. I mean, I had the guru sit­ting in front of me, in a chat­ty mood. What did I get? Bup­kis: “You know, it just depends…”  It was­n’t a bull­ish sign. So I took it to mean “Stay on the side­lines, kid.” In 2007, it seemed like sound advice.

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