University of Bologna

This is a special studies course with projects arranged between the student and faculty member. The specific topics of study vary each term and are described on a special study project form for each student. The number of units varies with the student's project, contact hours, and method of assessment, as defined on the student's special study project form.

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."

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 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.

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. This course offers an understanding of the different systems of attainment, transfer, and conservation of knowledge in ancient societies all over the world. The course focuses on the methods and procedures for exchanging and archiving wisdom in different cultures and offers a comparison with regard to specific aims and effectiveness in storing knowledge and information, with attention to material aspects. Emphasis is also placed on recently established databases that aim to collect data and texts of ancient authors and literary works, and to carve out new tendencies in the conception of modern storage systems on the basis of a widened perspective regarding the classification of cultural memories. Highlights of the course are the recent developments in Digital Papyrology and interdisciplinary and intercultural connections, as well as the application of different scientific approaches. The course focuses on how different ancient cultures across the world, from Greek-Latin to Indian, Chinese, Meso-American and the like, have faced and solved the problem of the organization and transmission of written data, both in the documentary field (the texts of everyday life and of administration: letters, accounts, contracts, lists) and in the literary field (books). Particular attention is placed on how, within different pre-modern cultural systems, people conceived and organized their archives. The preferred methodological approach is that of archiving as a social practice, which in turn allows for a cross-cultural comparison of phenomena beyond the European and modern idea of archive. Among the points to be explored are the difference between documents that can be discarded or that must be preserved (short or long term); the different ways of organizing the material writing support and – where possible – the physical place where the texts are stored; finally, the course refocuses attention on the activities of non-elite players and generally stresses the diffusion of archival practices throughout societies. Special attention is devoted to the implications of this methodological approach to the digitalization of ancient archives.

This is an advanced course that is part of the Laurea Magistrale program. The course is intended for advanced level students only. Enrollment is by consent of the instructor. There are three versions of this course; this course, “GEOGRAPHY OF GLOBAL CHALLENGES,” UCEAP Course Number 177B and Bologna course number 95931, is associated with the LM in Local and Global Development degree programme. One of the other versions, “GEOGRAPHIES OF GLOBAL CHALLENGES,” UCEAP Course Number 177A and Bologna course number 81952, is associated with the LM in History and Oriental Studies degree programme. The final version “GEOGRAPHY OF DEVELOPMENT,” UCEAP Course Number 176 and Bologna course number 19695, is associated with the LM in Local and Global Development degree programme.
Climate change offers the opportunity for a multidisciplinary analysis. The course discusses various aspects of the topic through a primarily geographical approach. The course is structured into three parts. Part one introduces climate change as a global phenomenon, with its natural and anthropogenic root causes. Students discuss and reflect on the socio-spatial inequalities inherent in the climate crisis. Part two analyzes climate governance, the Kyoto Protocol, and the Post Kyoto adaptation and mitigation strategies. In addition to the policy-making process, the course critically examines theoretical frameworks of adaptation, notions of climate justice, and intersectional approaches to addressing the climate crisis and its colonial roots. Part three concerns climate change and mobility. The course examines the complex interconnections between climate change and (im)mobility. Empirical examples are drawn from the #ClimateOfChange [https://climateofchange.info/publications-press/] interdisciplinary research project to contextualize the climate crisis as it is manifested, resisted, and understood from diverse locations across the globe. At the end of the course students show understanding of some of the global challenges the population of the planet has been facing since the second half of the twentieth century. Among these, the critical relation with the natural resources and with the concept of development and, above all, climate change, with its connections to territorial development, ecological risk, food security, and the consumption of natural resources. At the end of the course, the students have acquired the theoretical and empirical tools to critically analyze the global strategies of climate resilience and cooperation and the relation between climate change and tourism.

This is a special studies course with projects arranged between the student and a faculty member. The specific topics of study vary each term and are described on a special study project form for each student. The number of units varies with the student's project, contact hours, and method of assessment, as defined on the student's special study project form.