University of Commerce Luigi Bocconi

This course offers an exploration of the origins, functions, and effects of political institutions in historical perspective, paying particular attention to their dynamics (that is, how different institutions appeared and how they changed over time). The course utilizes critical reading and discussion of research papers that apply theoretical insights and empirical tools to engage in major debates about the nature and consequences of political institutions. The course integrates material from a variety of disciplines including political science, international relations, political philosophy, economics, and history. The course examines what types of political institutions form, why they form, what they do, and how they evolve. Students discuss a series of debates related to the rise and consolidation of states in historical perspective, and review current (and some classic) works on the subject. These debates include why nation-states came to dominate over other state forms (such as empires or city-states), which role elites played in state formation, in which ways the functions of the state began to take shape, or how state capacity was built and sustained in different places and times. 

This is an intensive beginning Italian language course designed for students with 0-1 quarters of previous Italian language. This course serves as an introduction to Italian language for Bocconi students. Basic grammar is applied through exercises, games, communicative activities, short written texts and oral monologues and role play. Students learn to express basic needs, enabling them to communicate in familiar situations regarding familiar topics. Students read brief, simple texts and write brief descriptive and narrative texts. Grammar topics covered include: regular and irregular verbs, regular and irregular participles, reflexive forms, auxiliary and modal verbs (eg. potere, dovere, volere), and use of the verb 'piacere'. Students learn active conjugation of the auxiliary verbs, 'essere' and 'avere' and regular verbs in the indicative tense (present, past tense, imperfect, future simple); the conditional present and the imperative. Other grammatical elements include forms and uses of simple and articulated prepositions, adverbs, connectives, determinate and indeterminate articles, gender and number of adjectives, common regular and irregular nouns, demonstrative adjectives and pronouns, subject pronouns, direct and indirect pronouns, reflexive pronouns, and possessives. Student performance is evaluated based on quizzes and a final exam. Texts include a reader provided by Bocconi.

The course provides a general introduction to the study of law, starting with the basic concepts of jurisprudence. The expected goal is that students become acquainted with the fundamentals of private law both at the domestic and the international level. Particularly, the course deals with some of the essential rules applicable to economic activities and focus on the interaction between party autonomy and market regulation in business transactions. The expected goal is that students learn how to tackle and discuss legal problems and gain a good command of the terminology of private law. The course adopts an international perspective and highlights the main differences between civil law and common law jurisdictions in the context of the Western legal tradition. The aim is to provide guidance on issues of international relationships in which the applicable law can crucially influence the economic outcome of a transaction. In this regard, European private law is also taken into consideration, with a specific focus on the rules aiming to protect consumers vis-à-vis professionals. In the final part of the course, small groups of attending students are given an assignment. The expected goal is to train students in addressing legal issues by drawing up a memorandum and/or a presentation. Written midterm, final exam, group project.

The first objective of the course is to explore and understand the storytelling epic, the symbolic imaginaries, and the ideological architectures of media events, both planned and unplanned. The specific focus on the recent "trauma television," the coverage of dramatic moments in human and medium history will provide students a further direct-experience based occasion to develop a critical and meaning creation oriented approach towards the medium. The final goal is to let students appreciate how television works, how it’s able to take a precise picture of constitutive parameters, problematic conjunctions, practices, moods, and contradictions of society, and why it still plays such a strategic role in social, cultural, and political issues in national and international contexts. The course main subject is essentially the relation of reciprocal influence between television and society. Built on a solid critical basis, mostly linked to cultural studies, sociology and journalism theories, the course is designed under the theoretical umbrella of the most important medium scholars, from McLuhan to Beaudrillard, and from Kellner to Dayan and Katz. The course discusses topics including television communication in general, its main theories, its complex spectrum of meanings, its storytelling processes, and its numerous social implications; the media events field, with ritual planned events (typically contests, conquests, coronations) and disruptive unplanned ones (disaster, terror, and war); and the "trauma television" of the last two years that is putting unexpected events in the television central stage as never before, even in some cases questioning their very notion – specifically the pandemic, the Capitol Hill riots, the various natural disasters caused by the climate change, and the Taliban takeover of Aghanistan – ground-breaking examples of the link between medium, contemporary history and our everyday life.

The first goal of this course is to discuss the main contemporary macroeconomic issues, particularly in Europe, using a rigorous framework but with an emphasis on facts and problems as opposed to complicated theoretical models. The second goal of this course is methodological. Most, if not all, macroeconomic problems do not have an obvious, black-or-white solution: there are pros and cons in any solution we might think of. And in virtually all cases reasonable and competent individuals have very different views of the same issue. The course strives to present all the main sides of the debate, instead of presenting a simple model with a simple, one-sided solution. The course discusses topics including preliminaries: GDP and national income accounting, price indices, nominal and real quantities; preliminaries: interest rate and bond prices; preliminaries: a basic macroeconomic model; money, the monetary base, and the balance sheets of the sectors; the money supply process; the response of monetary policy to the Eurozone crises; the government deficit and debt; the debate on government debt; the debate on the effects of government spending and taxes; the debate on fiscal consolidations and austerity; the exchange rate and the current account; monetary and fiscal policies in an open economy; the debate about monetary unions and the Euro; and the view from Germany. Prerequisite: At least one course in macroeconomics and knowledge of calculus and differential equations.

In today's information-driven economy, firms increasingly rely on data pertaining to markets, products, and consumer behavior to inform strategic decision-making in areas such as pricing, advertising, and customer targeting. When correctly used, these data serve as critical inputs for developing effective marketing strategies. This course equips students with the analytical tools and methodological frameworks necessary to leverage such data for strategic marketing applications. The emphasis is on secondary data, i.e., data generated from actual consumer behavior or firm-level decisions. Examples include aggregate market-level data (e.g., car sales statistics), disaggregate panel data (e.g., household grocery purchases), and individual-level digital traces (e.g., online clickstream data). In contrast, primary data, which are collected through surveys or conjoint studies specifically for a particular research purpose, are covered in the Marketing Research class. Prerequisites: background knowledge on statistics, economics, and econometrics, as well as data analysis and relevant coding skills. 

The landscape of financial institutions has dramatically changed since the 2008-09 global financial crisis. The regulatory framework applicable to financial institutions has changed accordingly, to provide stricter responses and render institutions more resilient. In light of these changes, the course focuses on the main issues faced by banks and insurance companies over the last two decades. These include funding and investment strategies as well as risk management and performance measurement, together with the rise of new types of financial institutions such as FinTech and non-bank lenders. The course analyzes topics including the banking industry today: players, strategies, and regulation; liabilities management and credit policy in banking: financial instruments and business practices; banking business and risk management, focusing on credit risk and the NPL issue; financial statement analysis and performance measures in banking; Insurance process and insurance premiums ;risk and capital management for insurers; and financial statement analysis and performance measures in insurance. Background knowledge of statistics (mean, variance, covariance, OLS) and portfolio theory is highly recommended. Furthermore, knowledge and application of financial mathematics (fixed income pricing, and duration measures) is highly recommended.