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- Code:
- ECON-CV002
- Field:
- Financial economics
- Target:
- Bachelor's students
- Organiser:
- Aalto University
- Instructor:
- Ville Savolainen
- Period:
- Period 2
- Format:
- Lecture
- Method:
- Contact teahcing
- Venue:
- Otaniemi campus
- Enrollment:
In case of conflicting information consider the Sisu/MyCourses pages the primary source of information.
Hanken and UH economics students can enroll in their home university’s SISU! Further instructions can be found on the How to enroll? page, also for other students.
Before taking and completing the course make sure that the credits can be counted towards your degree at your home university by checking which courses are included in your curriculum or by contacting your home university’s student/learning services.
- To access the course workspace, use all the features and participate in the activities (assignments, discussions), you must have successfully registered for the course in Sisu and logged in with your Aalto user ID.
- For more information on how to activate your Aalto user ID and register for a MyCourses course area, click here.
Content
This course covers recent developments in the area of financial innovation (FINTECH), such as blockchain, digital currencies, peer-to-peer method of identifying ownership, and smart contracts. Its goal is to analyze the emergence of blockchain and related innovations as highly disruptive technologies for the financial industry, business laws, accounting and monetary economics (central banking).
To fully understand the implications of such technologies, we will cover various related topics such as the nature of money, legacy payment and banking, basics of cryptography, digital currency systems, peer-to-peer transactions, governance and regulation of emerging technologies, double entry bookkeeping, and financial exchanges. We will also focus on several digital currencies, their “intrinsic value,” the reasons for their recent popularity, and the microstructure of their trading. Finally, we will survey various ventures that begun to capitalize on these innovations. The course also intends to create a bridge between economics, business, law, and computer science. Students majoring in these areas would be equipped with a basic knowledge in each other’s fields, which should enhance the quality of their communications after entry into their corresponding careers.
Learning outcomes
After completing the course, you will be able to:
- describe the nature of Blockchain technology
- evaluate differences between consensus mechanisms from the perspective of security
- use economic concepts and theories to analyze blockchain
- discuss the FINTECH applications currently being explored for a wide variety of uses and functions
- asses when and why peer-to-peer method of identifying ownership and network based bookkeeping creates a form of trust
- analyze the main reasons behind the popularity of stateless digital currencies and discuss their implications for the future of the monetary policy set by a country’s central bank
- describe the regulatory and governance challenges facing corporations, central banks, decentralized and centralized exchanges, and various government institutions dealing with this technology
- understand why various corporations and banks try to co-opt the Blockchain technology into their existing business models; describe how the Initial Currency Offerings (ICOs) and tokenization work and discuss why they can be a form of external financing for some firms