Business Administration

This course discusses machine learning and its uses in business decision-making. Topics include: data extraction and exploration; basic models for classification and regression; training, hyper-parameter tuning, model evaluation, pre-processing; feature selection and generation; advanced models for classification and regression; unsupervised learning.

This course examines the main elements of natural language processing (NLP), text analytics, and text mining, providing students with a foundation in collecting, managing, and analyzing textual data with financial and economic applications in mind, such as FinTech. Examples of potential applications include understanding and responding to sentiment in financial newspapers and social media, using social media to improve performance in asset/investment management, due diligence, Fed watching, monitoring of company events, and detecting insider trading. Although students write their own computer programs in this course, they are not required to implement most algorithms from scratch. Instead, the focus of this course is on how to use existing state-of-the-art open-source software libraries and how to apply them in a financial context. This course consists of three parts. In the first part, we work with real-world textual data sets to obtain proficiency in collecting, importing, organizing, and cleaning textual data from sources related to finance and economics. Among others, we cover web scraping, textual corpora, text processing, tokenization, stemming, and stop word removal. In the second part we delve into a more detailed analysis of NLP, text analytics, and machine learning with a particular focus on FinTech. For instance, we examine bag-of-words, word weighting schemes, document classification, document clustering, sentiment analysis, and topic models. The third part consists of summarizing, displaying, and visualizing results obtained from NLP and text analytics for applications in finance and economics.

This course introduces students to a variety of theoretical models, tools, and techniques which explore psychological well-being and their applicability in personal and professional development, and in the business world. These models are used as the basis for developing self-awareness, personal and professional strength and growth, and evaluating how these can be fostered in others, in order to achieve a positive impact on personal, professional, and organizational performance, through adaptability and change.

This course offers a study of the principles of finance. Topics include: financial economics; financial mathematics; investment appraisal; fixed income securities; risk and return; portfolio theory; capital asset pricing model; derivatives products.

This course is an introduction to ways of thinking about technology, using historical, sociological and philosophical perspectives. The course starts with lectures and seminars on fundamental questions: what is technology? Is technology socially shaped? Do artefacts have politics? What are the common mistakes in thinking about technology? The course then addresses major themes (industrialization and division of labor, technological lock-in, gender and technology, non-Western technology and maintenance) and key theories and models (Marx, Foucault, Heidegger). The course ends by addressing provocative questions such as: can machines think? Can machines be ethical? Do machines evolve?

This course is divided into two parts: entrepreneurship and small business management. In part one, it focuses on evaluating business opportunities, developing business ideas, and creating a business plan. In part two, it focuses on factors related to small and medium-sized firms (SMEs) such as human resources management, financing, and growth.

This course draws on global marketing/business situations and contexts to introduce students to the theory and practical application of negotiations with an emphasis on practical skill development. Negotiation can be taught and—with practice—improved with experience. This course covers research on negotiation-related issues but also provides a platform to develop actual negotiation skills and practice them in-class (and optionally online) using group negotiation simulations in a role-playing-game format
(RPG).

Firms are faced with informational and cognitive problems that threaten their efficiency and even their survival. This course shows how contract and governance structures can answer these problems. It explains how corporate firms, in their various forms, can be analyzed as networks of property rights; shows how their different organizational designs can be explained by knowledge and information constraints. It then analyzes, through theoretical models (incentives, screening, signaling, etc.) and case studies (CEOs' remunerations), the ways in which asymmetries of both information and knowledge have led to specific modes of executive governance and compensation.

This course discusses investment planning and financing functions in the short and long term in a company landscape. It also focuses on management and control of a company's financial plan.