Can anyone clarify the specific differences between Economics/Finance/Financial Engineering/etc?

[Ohad]

Hi,

I started this thread due to my (and it seems I'm not alone) confusion , it seems to me that people like me who doesn't have formal education/experience in either of these fields get slightly confused.

I admit that when I look at programs of these (and similar fields) I'm not 100% sure what are the differences and if it fits what I want to do.

So if we can get a proper thread explaining this in detail I believe many will benefit from it.

Thanks,
Ohad.

 

[Tsotne]

Finance is the study of funds management. The general areas of finance are business finance, personal finance(private finance), and public finance. Finance includes saving money and often includes lending money. The field of finance deals with the concepts of time, money, risk and how they are interrelated. It also deals with how money is spent and budgeted.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finance

Financial engineering is a multidisciplinary field relating to the creation of new financial instruments and strategies, typically exotic options and specializedinterest rate derivatives. The field applies engineering methodologies to problems in finance, and employs financial theory and applied mathematics, as well as computation and the practice of programming; see computational finance.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_engineering

Economics is the social science that analyzes the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services.
Economics aims to explain how economies work and how economic agents interact. Economic analysis is applied throughout society, in business, finance and government, but also in crime, education, the family, health, law, politics, religion,social institutions, war, and science.The expanding domain of economics in the social sciences has been described aseconomic imperialism.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics

In economics, the subdiscipline of econometrics has been defined as broadly as the discipline concerned with the development of economic science in concert with mathematics and statistics. It has also been defined more narrowly as the application of mathematics and especially of statistical methods to economics. Theoretical econometrics studiesstatistical properties of econometric procedures: Such properties include power of hypothesis tests and the efficiency ofsurvey-sampling methods, of experimental designs, and of estimators. Applied econometrics includes the application of econometric methods to assess economic theories and the development and use of econometric models, for use in economic history and in economic forecasting
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Econometrics.