最近金融学的发展史

Finance Theory

Finance theory has a surprisingly short history in

economics. Economists have long been aware of the basic economic function of credit markets but they were not keen on analyzing it much further than that. As such, early ideas about financial markets were largely intuitive, mostly formulated by practitioners. Pioneering theoretical work on financial markets, notably that of Louis Bachelier (1900), tended to be basically ignored by theoreticians and practitioners alike.

Portfolio Theory

This does not mean that the early economists ignored financial

markets. Irving Fisher (1906, 1907, 1930) had already outlined the basic functions of credit markets for economic activity, specifically as a way of allocating resources over time -- and had recognized the

importance of risk in the process. In developing their theories of money, John Maynard Keynes (1930, 1936), John Hicks (1934, 1935, 1939), Nicholas Kaldor (1939) and Jacob Marschak (1938) had already conceived of portfolio selection theory in which uncertainty played an important role. However, for many economists during this early period, financial markets were still regarded as mere "casinos" rather than "markets" properly speaking. In their view, asset prices were determined largely by expectations and counter-expectations of capital gains and thus they were "held up by their own bootstraps" as it were. John Maynard Keynes's "beauty contest" analogy is representative of this attitude.

As such, a good amount of ink was spent on the topic of speculative activity (i.e. the purchase/temporary sale of goods or assets for later

resale). For instance, in their pioneering work on futures markets, John