This course will present modern theories of financial markets and asset valuation. The first part of the course will cover the principle of no arbitrage, state prices and the stochastic discount factor, utility functions and portfolio choice, and equilibrium pricing and risk-neutral pricing. The second part of the course will build on this material and develop additional tools to explore the effects of frictions in financial markets, such as asymmetric information, costs of search and market participation, leverage constraints and delegated portfolio management.