耶鲁大学金融市场英文文本financialmarketslecture07transcript.docVIP

Financial Markets: Lecture 7 Transcript Professor Robert Shiller: Todays lecture is about behavioral finance and this is a term that emerged into public consciousness around the mid-1990s; before that it was unknown. The term efficient markets is much older; I mentioned the idea goes back to the nineteenth century and the term goes back to the 1960s. But behavioral finance is a newer revolution in finance and its something that I have been very involved with. I have been organizing workshops in behavioral finance ever since 1991, working with Professor Richard Thaler at University of What behavioral finance is a reaction against extreme--some extremes--that we see in efficient markets theory or also in mathematical finance. Mathematical finance is a beautiful structure and I admire what the people have done and Ive worked in it myself, but it has its limits. Eventually--you know the way a paradigm develops--it goes through a certain phase. When mathematical finance was new, say in the 1960s, it was the exciting thing and nobody wanted to work on anything else; you wanted to be doing the exciting thing. As the 70s and 80s wore on, it got to be a little bit overdone; people run with it too far, they think thats all we want to do, and we dont want to think about anything else. Then they start to get sometimes a little crazy. Than we had to reflect that, well, things arent perfect. The world isnt perfect and we have real people in the world, so that led to the behavioral finance. Behavioral finance really means--what does it mean? Its not like behavioral psychology. It doesnt mean behavioral psychology applied to finance. It really means something much more broad than that. It means all of the other social sciences applied to finance. The economics department is just one of many departments in the university that teaches us something about how people behave, so if we want to understand how people behave we cant rely only on the economics department. I think that its