I finally bought some shares in Mike Merrill, the IPO man. I've been using him for years when talking about corporate governance, and finally decided to take a financial interest in him by buying some shares on his website. I don't expect to make any money from my "investment," but the Wired article illustrates some … Continue reading Using the IPO man to teach about corporate governance

The price of textbooks has risen fifteenfold since 1970, three times the rate of inflation. I've written previously (Breaking the textbook drug habit) about this problem, but there is an even better solution for those of you teaching corporate finance/financial management. Ivo Welch, a professor at UCLA, has written a corporate finance textbook with a free … Continue reading Free corporate finance textbook

The New York Times had a great article about getting the most out of college. I'm going to recommend it to all of my students and advise you to read it too. The article makes the following recommendations to students: You'll get the most out of college if you don't just see it as a … Continue reading How to Get the Most Out of College

While my students eventually learn to do the calculations to solve numerical problems, they often struggle to understand financial concepts. In the past, I gave them a handful of in-class essays that were graded and accounted for 10-20% of their overall grades, thus giving them a strong incentive to pay close attention to our discussion … Continue reading Teaching financial concepts (v1.1)

I used to be a banker, but I lost interest. Take all your savings and buy some good stock and hold it till it goes up, then sell it. If it doesn't go up, don't buy it. A client asks his adviser, "is all my money really gone?" "No, of course not," the adviser says. "It’s just … Continue reading Best finance jokes

While many people think that great teachers are born, there is a growing body of evidence showing that great teachers can be made. While most of the research was done at the primary and secondary education levels, many of the findings are applicable to tertiary education, including college finance. Research by the Sutton Trust and the University … Continue reading Teaching best practices and myths

Stock market games, such as Virtual Stock Exchange, SmartStocks, Wall Street Survivor, or How the market works, seem like a good way of engaging students in an investments course. Students buy and sell stocks and are ranked by their performance. However, I try to discourage my students from participating in these trading simulations as much as … Continue reading Why I don’t use stock market games anymore

Over the years, I've experimented with new teaching tools and approaches to increase the level of engagement in my finance classroom, with various levels of success. Here are the ones that I'm still actively using: Flipped classroom Classroom response system (iClickers and Tophat) In-class essays Online homework (Accepi and Connect Finance) Online Q&A sites/forum (Piazza) … Continue reading Ask me anything about the flipped classroom, clickers, simulations, etc.

The good people at the Open Syllabus Project looked at over a million syllabi and extracted citations and other metadata from them, including textbooks and journal articles. The top general book in finance is "A Random Walk Down Wall Street", the top textbook is "Corporate Finance" by Ross and the most assigned journal article is … Continue reading Analyzing a million syllabi

The Wall Street Journal published an article called "Why Banks at Wal-Mart Are Among America's Top Fee Collectors" on May 11, 2014. The article begins as follows: "On a rainy morning in April, Anna Proctor entered a Wal-Mart Supercenter near some of this city's poorest areas to get $300 for urgent car repairs—money she didn't … Continue reading Exercise: Bank overdraft fee