Professor
Understanding Derivative Securities
Jaksa Cvitanic is a Professor of Mathematical Finance at the California Institute of Technology, one of the top ten universities in the world. He teaches options, interest rate and credit risk derivatives, mathematical finance and contract theory. In addition to regular university courses, he has taught several short intensive courses, including, most recently, in November 2006, a course on options for MBA students in EDHEC Nice, and previously short courses for undergraduate students in Johannesburg, and graduate students in Kyoto, Berlin, Paris and Bressanone. His former students work as analysts at big Wall Street investment banks and other banks throughout the US and the world, as well as professors in Business Schools and Quantitative Finance programs. He has co-authored some fundamental papers on financial markets with portfolio constraints, transaction costs, and other market imperfections. Cvitanic is the author of over thirty articles published in top scholarly finance, economics and mathematics journals, and a co-author, with Fernando Zapatero, of the textbook "Introduction to the Economics and Mathematics of Financial Markets", published by MIT Press. He is one of the co-editors of "Finance and Stochastics" and "Mathematics and Financial Economics, and is on editorial boards of four other journals. He is a member of the Council of the Bachelier Finance Society. Prior to joining Caltech in 2005, Cvitanic was a Professor of Mathematics and Economics at the University of Southern California, and before that, an Assistant and Associate Professor of Statistics at Columbia University. He was awarded a Ph.D by Columbia University in New York in 1992.