Abstract:

The term “study” in the title concerns the scientific research, which had close relationships with university economic education and organization management. The report describes the experience of the study of new financial products, technologies and institutions in the spheres of enterprise (corporation) governance, financial stimuli, financial markets, commercial banking, and insurance. The author and the teams of researches and managers developed special mathematical models with corresponding software for each sphere, data sets for testing, and methodical recommendations for application in research, university education (for example in simulation games), and practice of management. We elaborated these instruments taking into account prominent foreign research by Forrester, Naylor, and other authors. As well as our leading principle was “from simple to complex”. This approach helped us to update some models and recommendations according new market conditions and create new instruments according to new trends in the world finance and computers hard and software. The report contains a set of illustration for this statement. The first illustration is the course “Financial economics” for master’s level.

The topics are the following:
1. Introduction to the financial economics (finance, credit and problems of the XX — XXI centuries; financial economics as a field of economic research; financial innovations and approaches to their study).
2. Innovations in securities markets (securities markets: history, structures and trends); options; structured products and hybrid securities).
3. Innovations in banking (banking history, structures and trends; risk management in a commercial bank; credit derivatives).
4. Innovations in insurance (property and personal insurance; pensions and medical insurance; problems of energy and ecology, and new links with finance).
5. Corporate finance (company valuation; mergers and acquisitions; financing of entrepreneurship).

Our team elaborated a special software and databases for realization of this course, as well as textbook, methodical guidance with variants of individual tasks. The second illustration presents a set of PhD dissertations on separate financial innovations, which were prepared under the author’s scientific supervision. There are a few examples. A. Bekarev was the first, who has shown the possibility of applying the theory of “learning organizations” to the analysis of innovative interaction of commercial banks and their clients. M. Petukhova proposed a methodology for assessing the credit risk of individuals in the retail-lending sector. D. Potapenko revealed unexplored research directions and methods of financial management for the firms that operate in the medical equipment market. M. Kaneva developed a complex of models for financial risk management based on exotic options with reference to Russian conditions. This complex includes the description of options, models and algorithms, option pricings, and modifications, reflecting features of currency and other financial markets and financial risk in the real sector. She also shows examples of the complex in the currency market, electric power industry and biotechnology.

I am planning to widen the presented ideas, methods, and examples in the report.

Keywords:

Financial innovation, research, education, practice, Russia.