Exercises and Solutions in Finance

by Gary Smith

Overview

This book contains hundreds of engaging, class-tested finance exercises (and detailed solutions) that test student understanding of the material. Many are educational in their own right—for example, delaying social security benefits does not give a safe 8% real return; the correlation between bond and stock returns is not stable, and most measures of company performance regress toward the mean.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781041048367
Publisher:	CRC Press
Publication date:	09/01/2025
Pages:	300
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.19(h) x (d)

About the Author

Gary Smith is the Fletcher Jones Professor of Economics at Pomona College. He has won two teaching awards and written (or co-authored) more than 100 academic papers and 20 books. His statistical and financial research has been featured in various media, including The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Wired, NPR Tech Nation, NBC Bay Area, CNBC, WYNC, WBBR Bloomberg Radio, NBC Think, Silicon Valley Insider, Motley Fool, Scientific American, Forbes, MarketWatch, MoneyCentral.msn, NewsWeek, Fast Company, The Economist, MindMatters, OZY, Slate, and BusinessWeek.

Table of Contents

Introduction   1. Present Value   2. The Term Structure   3. Amortized Loans   4. Bonds   5. Stock Exchanges   6. Dividend-Discount Models   7. Earnings and Assets   8. Real Assets   9. Conservation of Value   10. Technical Analysis   11. The Efficient-Market Hypothesis   12. The Human Factor in Investments   13. Mean-Variance Analysis   14. CAPM and Other Factor Models   15. Derivatives   16. Miscellaneous   17. Longer Exercises

Editorial Reviews

"Gary Smith has given us a treasure trove of questions about the practical applications of financial economics. Anyone teaching a course on capital markets, corporate finance, or personal finance will find a rich variety of puzzles here, some conceptual, some numerical, and many that remind us how easy it is for pundits to go astray when they fail to think like economists. This book is a superb resource for the teaching of finance." — John Y. Campbell, Morton L. and Carole S. Olshan Professor of Economics, Harvard University.

"To be successful in finance, it is important to know what you know and to know what you don’t know. This book is an invaluable resource to calibrate your expertise. Highly recommended." —  Campbell R. Harvey, Professor, Duke University, 2016 American Finance Association President.

"Coming up with excellent questions for a introductory finance class is quite challenging.  Gary Smith has assembled a treasure trove of interesting and thought-provoking questions that can be used as exam questions or as the focus of discussion sections." — John Shoven, Professor, Stanford University, undergraduate finance teacher for 45 years.

"Gary is brilliant with an uncanny clarity on finance. His incisive commentary on practical finance questions always cuts right to the chase and is so illuminating." — Hamilton Helmer, author of 7 Powers and Co-Founder of Strategy Capital

"Gary has put together a masterful collection of finance questions emanating from his 50 years of teaching finance courses. Other professors will definitely find them useful in their classes." — Brian Nelson, Founder and President of Equity Research, Valuentum Securities, Inc.

"Gary has created an entertaining collection of test questions and answers addressing the most important topics of finance. The questions illustrate common mistakes made by the media and even academics. The answers are entertaining and informative. Every finance student should be required to read this book." — Gary Antonacci, author of Dual Momentum Investing: An Innovative Strategy for Higher Returns with Lower Risk.

From the Publisher