Best wishes for a safe and happy Thanksgiving holiday. When you come back to campus, we'll obviously be finishing up Finance 4366. I have really enjoyed the class and wish all of you the best, whatever you are doing after this semester.
Here's my plan for the last two class sessions for Finance 4366.
1. Tuesday, November 30: We will pick up from where we left off today; specifically, we will work through the comparative statics analysis for call and put options (pages 24-37 of the lecture note entitled "The Black-Scholes Model". Time permitting, we will also work through my write-up on the solution to Problem 12.26 from the textbook.
2. Thursday, December 2: We will cover the lecture note entitled "Optimal Exercise Rules for American and European Options". The class will conclude with a review session for the final exam, and you will also complete the teacher evaluation form.
I have one more problem set assigned for Finance 4366. This consists of Hull, Chapter 12, p. 261, questions 12.24, 12.25, 12.27, 12.28, and it will be due on Thursday, December 2. At that time, I will make the solutions for the problem set available to you.
The final exam is scheduled for 2-4 p.m. on Friday, December 10 in HCB 408. It will be comprehensive in nature, and as I note in the course syllabus, the grade you receive on the final will also count for one of your midterm exams if it is higher than the scores on either of the midterms (anyone want to venture a guess as how one might use option pricing theory to compute the value of this option?).
I highly recommend two articles which have appeared recently on CollegeJournal:
1. "It's Never Too Early To Start Your Job Hunt"
2. "Up Next For Seniors: Compose a Resume"
Today's OpinionJournal features a very interesting and insightful article by John Fund entitled "High Bias". The basic premise of Fund's article is that political bias is alive and well in academia. Specifically, Fund claims that there is a "...lack of intellectual diversity on university campuses, whose faculties are overwhelmingly liberal."
Fund cites several studies which document the lack of intellectual diversity in academia. For example, one of the newest studies on this topic (by Swedish sociologist Charlotta Stern and Santa Clara University economist Daniel Klein) finds that in a random national sample of 1,678 responses from university professors, Democratic professors outnumber Republicans 3 to 1 in economics. 28 to 1 in sociology and 30 to 1 in anthropology. A particularly noteworthy quote comes from Robert Brandon, a Duke University philosophy professor, who offers a theory as to why conservatives are an endangered species on college and university campuses: "We try to hire the best, smartest people available. If, as John Stuart Mill said, stupid people are generally conservative, then there are lots of conservatives we will never hire. Mill's analysis may go some way towards explaining the power of the Republican Party in our society and the relative scarcity of Republicans in academia."