Maastricht University - School of Business and Economics

Given the continuously growing impact of the European Union on business, attention to politics is warranted in international business studies. At the same time, governance in the EU is far from straightforward, as it is based on a very complex mixture of political principles, structures, and institutions. This course looks at the wider institutional environment of the firm and provides background for doing business in Europe.  This course is a good option for students aspiring to work for non-governmental organizations (NGOs) or business practitioners in Europe. A creative, multidisciplinary approach is taken, using original and challenging literature from the literature on international business, comparative politics, and comparative economic systems. The course material assists in understanding past and current changes in the broader European business & politics landscape.

In many situations, economic actors need to make decisions while knowing that the final outcome also depends on the decisions of others. Such situations are called games, and the actors involved are called players. In order to reach a good decision, it is important for a player to reason about the decisions and motivations of their opponents. This course teaches how to reason about your opponents in game theoretic situations, and how to use this reasoning to make good decisions. The theory is applied to various economic situations of interest.

This course examines historical evolution in terms of human and organizational actors responding to opportunities in their environment in ways that pioneered entirely new industries and forms of business. This course studies a path-breaking historical development in one or more leading industrial capitalist nations during the second industrial revolution. The course zooms in on business activities and their outcomes, and zooms out to the historical and national context in which these events have taken place. Looking back at history can be concretely informative since much what exists now has its roots in the past. But studying history is also a way of developing creative notions about how humans interact with their business environment in a situation of pervasive uncertainty. This can broaden our mental scope in dealing with our own uncertain world. 

The purpose of this course is to study how investors (both retail and institutional) construct and manage portfolios. The course follows the investment process investors follow in real life. That is from Asset Liability Management to Strategic and Tactical Asset Allocation to Portfolio Management, Security Selection, and finally Trading. Each week the course studies a different asset class. Next to traditional assets like listed stocks we look at the added value of real estate, mutual funds, hedge funds, and private equity in order to build diversified portfolios. Finally the course introduces a new development in professional asset management; Socially Responsible Investing (SRI). The course studies the impact of SRI on portfolio return and risk. All topics are explored via real life cases using actual data.