Business Administration

This course enables students to apply both microeconomic and macroeconomic analysis to the assessment of current debates on financial and monetary issues. It provides a basic understanding of the following: the principles of bank management and their changing character in recent decades; strategies adopted by banks to address risk; the economic theory of bank intermediation; the role of banking in the financial system and in the wider economy; banking regulation and government intervention in the banking sector; theories and debates on the role and effectiveness of monetary policy; monetary aggregates, exchange rates, and inflation as targets of monetary policy; and the historical experience of UK monetary policy during the past three decades.

The course focuses on challenges of managing service brands and delivering quality service to customers across industry sectors. Theattraction, retention, and building of strong customer relationships through quality service (and services) are all at the heart of the course content. The course is equally applicable to organizations whose core product is service (e.g., banks, transportation companies, hotels, hospitals, educational institutions, professional services, telecommunication, etc.) and to organizations that depend on services for competitive advantage (e.g., high technology manufacturers, automotive, industrial products, etc.).

This course explores how strategy is formulated, implemented, and evaluated. Strategic management concepts, frameworks, and tools are applied to organizational case studies. Current debates in strategic management are evaluated for their relevance to strategists in a range of organizational contexts.

This course covers financial markets and instruments, investment strategies, the application of standard models of financial economics to problems of portfolio optimization, diversification, immunization, and risk management. The course provides a foundation to understand better FDI (Inward and Outward); deepening the knowledge about FDI in specific sectors and countries.

Corporate finance deals with the financing and investment decisions made by the management of companies in the pursuit of shareholder wealth maximization. The course gives a broad overview of important issues in corporate finance and combines insights from economics, business, and psychology. The economic side of corporate finance deals with the maximization of shareholder wealth. To do so, managers aim at securing the greatest possible return in exchange for accepting the smallest amount of risk. For instance, a company can finance itself by borrowing money from banks, by issuing bonds or through the stock market. These types of decisions influence the expected return and risk of the company. Traditional economics assumes that managers and investors are rational self-interested people. However, there is a large body of evidence from social psychology and behavioral economics that people often act irrationally and behave pro-socially by taking the social impact of decisions into account. The course also shows how decision making biases influence managers and investors in their financial decisions and how social preferences impact factors such as corporate social responsibility. The course is largely based on real life cases that we discuss in an interactive manner. Students debate on topics such as “should CEO bonuses be reduced?” and “is it important for firms to put corporate social responsibility high on their agenda?”

This course introduces students to basic principles of Macroeconomics and their applications to business. In addition to covering basic economic principles, the course will expose students to how the various principles apply to individual and business decision making. Topics to be covered include measurement of economic activity at the macroeconomic level, gross domestic product and related concepts, inflation, unemployment, fiscal and monetary policy.

This course explores how firms can take a proactive approach to the management of the meta-economic relationships with their non-market stakeholders. The course examines what corporate citizenship means today for managers, paying attention to the expectations they face, and the range of decisions they can take to deal effectively with these expectations. To prepare students for the management of corporate citizenship initiatives, the course focuses on three skills: identifying the opportunities and challenges posed by the non-market environment, designing corporate citizenship initiatives suitable to create relevant intangible assets, and understanding the relationship between corporate citizenship and competitive advantage. The course consists primarily on class discussions, role-plays, and case studies.

The rise of China and India, along with other big emerging economies in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, has shifted the focus of future corporate governance research and reforms to the way these economies finance and govern their companies. This course examines in detail the various typologies, systems, and models of corporate governance in emerging economies, and identifies the key drivers of corporate governance evolution in these countries. A focus of the course is to look at issues of convergence to and/or divergence from the Anglo-Saxon model of corporate governance and how such issues are reshaping our understanding of the underlying goals and assumptions of future corporate governance research and reforms in these economies.