Descriptif

The financial industry was until recently a very concentrated sector. This is becoming less and less true as a wave of innovations greatly lowers the barriers to entry and intensifies the degree of competition among providers of financial services. Disruptive technologies are being implemented at an increasing pace, leading to major changes in the realms of payments, lending and borrowing, insurance, wealth management, venture capital.
To understand this revolution, one needs to have a good grasp of technological innovations as well as of the economics of the financial sector. This course will introduce students to both dimensions, allowing them to identify how financial services can be improved with new approaches.
The course will put a strong emphasis on the blockchain protocol because of its disruptive potential, hopefully preparing the audience for the next wave of innovations. We will adopt a hands-on approach with the objective of enabling students to monitor transactions over Bitcoin’s blockchain

Reading list:

• Acemoglu, Daron and Simon Johnson. (2007). “Disease and Development: The Effect of Life Expectancy on Economic Growth”, Journal of Political Economy, Vol 115(6), pp. 925-985.
• Hoyt Bleakley (2010). “Malaria Eradication in the Americas: A Retrospective Analysis of Childhood Exposure.” American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, Vol. 2, pp.1-45.
• Das Jishnu and Jeffrey Hammer (2014) "Quality of Primary Care in Low-Income Countries: Facts and Economics," Annual Review of Economics, Vol. 6 pp. 525-553.
• Björkman Martina and Jakob Svensson (2009) “Power to the People: Evidence from a Randomized Field Experiment on Community-Based Monitoring in Uganda” The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. 124(2) pp.735–769.