Maastricht University - School of Business and Economics

To improve the performance of a firm, managers have to find tools to hire the right people, sort them into the right job, motivate them to do their work well, develop their skills through formal and informal learning, and cooperate efficiently with co-workers. Firms that stimulate one aspect might do so at the cost of others. Managers, therefore, face many complex trade-offs in their personnel policies. In this course, economic tools to understand these trade-offs are discussed and illustrated with examples of how to apply them in practice. Questions posed in the course include: Why should pay vary across workers within firms – and how "compressed" should pay be within firms? Should firms pay workers for their performance on the job or for their skills or hours of work? How are pay and promotions structured across jobs to induce optimal effort from employees? How are jobs designed and performance measures? Why use teams and how are teams used most effectively? How should all these human resource management practices, from incentive pay to teamwork, be combined within firms?

The course covers the real part of trade theory. It is a formal analysis of the reasons for international trade, the way different parties gain or lose from trade, and what can be done about that through trade policy. The subject matter is theoretical in nature, but the theory is illustrated using real life examples and cases.

This course examines fundamentals of international finance, international asset allocation and international financial management.