Maastricht University - School of Business and Economics

The objective of this course is to provide an introduction to modeling univariate and multivariate time series in economics. The topics covered include modeling non-stationary time series, Granger causality, co-integration, ARIMA, seasonality, ARCH, and Unit roots.

Organizations increasingly face diverse types of crises, such as natural disasters, accidents, scandals, employee discrimination, or cyber-attacks. Crises have negative, long-term consequences for organizations’ functioning, profitability, legal system, reputation, and human resource management systems. Managing organizational crises is, therefore, complicated and challenging, as it is difficult for organizations, leaders, and individuals to perform under urgent, ambiguous, stressful, and emotional situations. This course offers a framework to help understand how organizational crises arise and insight into the complexity of crisis management. The course consists of two main parts: (1) conditions that affect the vulnerability to an organizational crisis; and (2) crisis management. The first part concentrates on the factors that make an organization crisis-prone, such as human, social-cultural, and organizational-technological causes. The second part discusses crisis management, including what organizations can do to prevent crises and how to contain and resolve organizational crises.

This course improves students’ understanding of the complexities presented by managing businesses in an international environment. It begins with a historical background of globalization and the development of institutions to support international transactions. Potential similarities and differences between countries in economic development, political and legal systems, culture, government policies on trade, and in accepting foreign investments are discussed. Differences in national monetary systems and capital markets are considered with reference to globalization and the integration of world markets. The second part of this course reviews the role of location, the strategy and organization of multinational corporations (MNCs), cross-border alliances and international mergers and acquisitions, and the formation of international knowledge networks for technology creation. The course concludes with ethical issues faced by international businesses. The course uses Hill’s 14th edition of ISE International Business: Competing in the Global Marketplace. Students also need to register on the Harvard website (www.hbr.org) and purchase assigned cases using a link included in the course manual.

Ethics is characterized by a discourse on moral values, norms and standards, and the decision-making on the basis of sound argumentation. This ethics course confronts students with ethical and responsibility dilemmas which they study, reflect on, and discuss in small groups. Students who complete this course master the core insights of business ethics theory and corporate responsibility. All participants should have a basic understanding of the functioning of organizations, management of and co-ordination within organizations, organizational ecology, co-ordination mechanisms in industries, and of economic order.

Taking the perspective of women and entrepreneurship, this course takes a different approach to the role of the individual in the entrepreneurial process.  This course acknowledges that there are differences between the way men and women go about being entrepreneurs by focusing on entrepreneurship with different gender, economic, and cultural contexts and exploring which lessons one may draw from these different contexts, both from an academic as well as from a practical perspective. Rooted in a strong academic base, the course considers entrepreneurial concepts in different contexts leading to context-rich learning and a better appreciation of diversified entrepreneurial solutions.

This course offers an intensive introduction into the field of economic psychology. After a review of basic principles of rational decision-making under uncertainty, the first part of the course gives an overview of psychological research related to judgment and decision-making. Examples include insights from psychology on how decision-makers assess probabilities and how they evaluate the outcomes resulting from their decisions. Actual patterns of judgment and decision-making are compared to basic principles of rational decision-making in order to detect systematic behavioral regularities and biases of real decision-makers. The second part of the course deals with examples of how psychological regularities influence economic decision-making in the field and the importance of these regularities for law and policy. Finally, the course gives an introduction to the field of neuroeconomics.

This course provides students with the necessary sensitivity when applying theoretical models. The traditional model of the homo economicus is ubiquitous in microeconomic theory. Economic agents are assumed to be rational utility maximizers with self-regarding preferences and unlimited processing capacities. Common sense and the results of economic experiments show that this is not always the case. Often people behave differently than predicted by theory. This course deals with the following problem statements: 1) When does microeconomic theory apply and when does it lose its predictive power? 2) If it does not apply, what concepts and models can be used to either extend or substitute the current theory to describe human behavior? Specifically, students discuss the following issues: non-expected utility theory; inter-temporal choice; social preferences; reciprocity; levels of analytical reasoning; the role of mistakes; mental accounting; heuristics; and neuroeconomics.