Eric Hilt
Professor of Economics
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Focuses on the history of American business organizations and their governance, and more generally on the role of legal institutions in shaping economic and financial development.
My research focuses on the history of American business organizations and their governance, and more generally on the role of legal institutions in shaping economic and financial development. My most recent work has analyzed the impact of historical financial crises on the development of financial regulations; the role of bankers on the boards of 19th-century American corporations; and the shareholder protections intended to attract investors in early corporations. Earlier work analyzed the organizational forms and contracts utilized in the American whaling industry.
At Wellesley, I teach a class on American economic and financial history, a finance class, and Introductory Macroeconomics.
I am a research associate in the Development of the American Economy program of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and I am on the editorial board of the Journal of Economic History.
Education
- B.A., Occidental College
- M.Phil, Columbia University in the City of New York
- Ph.D., Columbia University in the City of New York
Current and upcoming courses
This course will use the insights of organization theory to analyze the development of the U.S. economy. The main topics to be examined will include: the evolution of the U.S. banking and financial system and the institutional changes underlying each phase of its development; the contractual foundations of business organizations and the choice between partnerships and the corporate form; the rise of big business and the great merger wave of the 1890s and the legal changes that made these developments possible; and the regulatory innovations of the Securities and Exchange Commission in the 1930s. The course will employ a variety of sophisticated theoretical and empirical methods in analyzing these developments and will present them in comparative international perspective.
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Economics Research Seminar
ECON380H
A seminar for senior economics majors engaged in independent research. Students will learn about the use of empirical techniques in economics, including the opportunity to engage with the research of prominent economists, who present their work at the Calderwood and Goldman seminars hosted by the department. Students will also present and discuss their own research at weekly meetings. Students may not accumulate more than 0.5 credit for this course. -
Economics Research Seminar
ECON380H
A seminar for senior economics majors engaged in independent research. Students will learn about the use of empirical techniques in economics, including the opportunity to engage with the research of prominent economists, who present their work at the Calderwood and Goldman seminars hosted by the department. Students will also present and discuss their own research at weekly meetings. Students may not accumulate more than 0.5 credit for this course. -
Finance Theory and Investments
ECON323
This course provides a rigorous treatment of the fundamentals of finance. Topics include the valuation of distant cash flows, pricing financial instruments such as stocks, bonds and options, portfolio choice, and equilibrium theories of asset pricing. Where possible, modern academic research that relates to these topics will be introduced and discussed.