Italy

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale program. The course is intended for advanced level students only. Enrollment is by consent of the instructor. The course focuses on the main international models of corporate governance and their specific problems. Special attention is placed on minority shareholders' protection and on the integration of the European Financial markets through the recent harmonization of financial regulations. The course discusses topics including an introduction to international corporate governance models; agency costs from separation of ownership and control in a public company; the US Enron scandal and the Sarbanes-Oxley Act; the Continental European Model; investors' protection around the world; corporate governance reforms and investors' protection in Italy; the value of the voting right in dual class firms; the Financial Services Action Plan and major EU directives; economics of takeovers and the EU takeover directive; and the Nabisco takeover and the movie "Barbarians at the gates."

This course demonstrates that crime and deviancy, rather than being found ready made in society, are produced, strengthened, and challenged by numerous competing forces and actors. Using Italy as a launchpad, the course approaches, analyzes, and discusses contemporary and historical case studies in which these forces and actors are located, in order to develop precisely those skills needed to question and dissect unfolding events in a sociological fashion. Italy has long had associations with organized crime, and the course studies first-hand this complex historical, sociological phenomenon, while simultaneously questioning those more socially immediate and recognizable forms of social "deviance" found in the modern Italian context. To aid this analysis, case studies are navigated in parallel with the pillars of sociological theory relating to crime and deviance, in order for discussions and theses about events to be rooted in, and aided by, models which facilitate thought and hypotheses.

The course explores the principles of financial analysis and provides a framework to understand how businesses’ values and risks are captured in financial statements and price them correctly. At the end of the course, students are able to understand various techniques in financial statement analysis; apply techniques to assess and compare firms’ financial position, performance, and credit risk; understand the limitations of financial statement numbers; extract accounting information to make forecasts and valuations; and select the most appropriate valuation model depending on the company analyzed. This course is relevant for students who want to pursue careers in investment banking (particularly in equity research), security analysis, private equity analysis, consulting firms, or corporate finance.

This ccourse is part of the Laurea Magistrale program. The course is intended for advanced level students only. Enrollment is by consent of the instructor. The course enables students to: be familiar with the structure of education systems in the developed world; recognize the goals of knowledge transmission, socialization, and selection typically pursued by education systems; be knowledgeable about sociological theories dealing with education; understand selection mechanisms enacted via education systems; identify the interests of the various stake-holders involved in educational activities; grasp the key features of the comparative approach to the study of teaching and learning processes; apply a set of tools for analyzing educational policies (as, for example social inequality) and thus interpret them, convey their principal characteristics and assess their outcomes.

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale program. The course is intended for advanced level students only. Enrollment is by consent of the instructor. The course carries out a comparative study regarding the main current European legal systems. In particular the focus is on civil law and common law in order to reconstruct the origins of a common legal culture with particular reference to private law and specifically to the law of obligations and contracts. In this context, the course investigates the persistence of rules and principles of roman law in the present system, working backward in search of the common legal bases that are the basis of the unification of the private projects in contemporary law. The aim of the course is to provide knowledge of European legal traditions, their origin in Roman and Medieval law and their subsequent development in two distinct areas: common law and civil law. At the end of the course, students are able to: understand the basis of the European legal tradition and distinguish it from that of other regions; know the origins of contracts and their differences in various national contexts.

This course focuses on understanding how the interconnected world economy and the global economy emerged historically and how globalization transformed economies and societies around the world. The course learns that globalization has not been a one-way street and that modern history witnessed periods of both increasing and diminishing globalization. The course provides students with the tools for understanding economic and social change in a historical and global perspective. The teaching material helps students develop critical thinking and narrative skills. The course examines how the global economy emerged in the past and how globalization transformed macro regions of the world. The first part of the course traces the connection between western expansion and the rise of the global economy from the 16th to 19th centuries and explains what factors - social, cultural, and technological - limited early globalization. The course studies how growing prosperity in Europe compared with the development of other world regions. The second part of the course discusses globalization and deglobalization in the industrial age and the shifts of global economic power they brought about. The course discusses modern economic history in a global context and focuses mainly on non-European regions. 

This course discusses topics including a general framework and short historical overview of affective neuroscience; features and functions of some fundamental brain areas/structures involved in emotional processing; research methods in affective neuroscience: strengths and limitations of animal models and neuroimaging techniques; the neural basis of fear, reward, and aggression; and the neural networks implicated in anxiety disorders, depression, and psychopathy. This course requires knowledge of the structure and functions of central and peripheral nervous system, and on general psychopathology, as a prerequisite.

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale degree program and is intended for advanced level students. Enrolment is by consent of the instructor. The course provides a general overview on business strategy main concepts and definitions. These concepts are discussed under critical lights by relating them to real world cases. Specific topics regarding the cultural and creative industries are addressed during the classes, and the boundaries between standard industrial contexts and the cultural ones are explored in depth. The classes cover the following topics introduction: what is a business strategy; the external perspective on strategy; the internal perspective on strategy; competitive advantage; competition analysis; partnerships and strategic alliances; innovation in cultural and creative industries; business models in creative and cultural industries; and intermediation in cultural and creative industries.