Financial Markets (2011)

Financial Markets is the Spring 2011 recording of Robert Shiller's undergraduate course ECON 252, published on Open Yale Courses as 23 lectures of about 75 minutes each. It begins with what finance is for and how societies manage risk, then takes the main institutions in turn: insurance and portfolio diversification, efficient markets, debt and leverage, corporate stocks, real estate, behavioral finance, banks, forward and futures markets, options, monetary policy, investment banks, professional money managers, exchanges and clearinghouses, and public and non-profit finance. Three guest lectures from practitioners sit inside the sequence.

Every session is offered as streaming video, downloadable video or audio, and a searchable transcript, with the syllabus, reading list, problem sets and exams posted alongside. Open Yale Courses is free and needs no registration, but nothing is graded and no certificate or credit is available. Yale also runs a Coursera edition of Financial Markets in which the whole course is free to take and a certificate can be bought separately.