Economics

This course introduces the concepts of financial accounting and its underlying assumptions. It studies basic accounting procedures including transaction recording in journals and ledgers and preparation and analysis of financial statements. It covers the principles of double-entry bookkeeping, interpretation of financial statements, issues raised by corporate regulation, and the use of management information for decision making. Topics include accounting and information for decision making; basic financial statements; the accounting cycle, capturing economic events, and reporting financial results; accounting for merchandising activities; financial assets; inventories and cost of goods sold; plant assets and depreciation; liabilities and stockholders' equity; income and changes in retained earnings; statement of cash flows; and financial statement analysis. Text: John J. Wild, Winston Kwok, Ken W. Shaw, and Barbara Chiappetta, PRINCIPLES OF FINANCIAL ACCOUNTING. Assessment: attendance and participation, assignments, midterm test, group project, final exam.

This course clarifies a number of key facts on the place and functions of the modern state in a selection of “advanced” or “developed” economies, mostly in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development sample. It adopts an approach by main themes of government intervention. It also traces the successive developments of the modern state over the past 200 years in order to highlight the logic of today’s functions and actions and their determinants and objectives. The lectures, along with economic data, weave together major insights from political philosophy, history, and sociology.

This course provides students with an analytical qualitative foundation for developing a business strategy for an organization based on tools within the area of strategic management, and draws on different theories of economic value creation. The course begins by covering central terms, concepts, and definitions in the area of strategy such as the mission, vision, and strategy of an organization, and then looks into different ways in which a strategy can be developed. In connection to this, behavioralism is discussed along with the idea of bounded rationality. This is followed by a discussion on how the environment of a company can be mapped and analyzed and how Porters Five Forces framework builds on the neoclassical theory and the structure of conduct performance paradigm. The course determines competitive advantages and how economic value is created through the internal resources, activities, and competencies of the firm. Furthermore, tools for mapping and analyzing the political and cultural context of the company are presented in connection to principal/agent theory and behavioralistic theory. After this, corporate strategies, business/competitive strategies, international strategies, growth strategies, and strategies on innovation are discussed. The different roles for the patterning company and the size of the corporation are covered drawing on transaction cost theory. When looking at the competitive strategies of the company, the course discusses the importance of long-term commitment and game theory. Furthermore, it is concerned with entrepreneurship, innovation, and internationalization. Finally, it looks at how to evaluate different strategies concerning their suitability, acceptability, and feasibility. The last section of the course looks at how companies can implement their strategies through organizational and management design and manage strategic change. Again, the course returns to the ideas of bounded rationality and the management of stakeholders introduced within behavioral theory.

The course, while giving an outline of global economic developments over the last hundred years and their implications in today’s world, focuses on key moments and areas in the history of the 20th Century – sometimes referred to as “age of extremes” starting in 1914 and ending in 1989 – and takes the story up to the first decade of the 21st Century.

This course focusses on how economic and finance principles learned in the classroom can be, and have been, applied to answer real-life questions and address problems faced by individuals, corporations and governments with extensive use of real-world case studies. Covering macroeconomic, microeconomic and finance topics, we will discuss the role and goals of central banks in developed economies and the challenges they face in controlling inflation, encouraging economic growth, ensuring the safety and soundness of the banking system and dealing with asset price bubbles and credit crunches. Case studies will focus on central bank failures in these areas.

We will examine how financial markets have developed (often differently) around the world to address the core problems of asymmetric information, moral hazard and transactions costs that must be addressed in transferring funds from investors to firms. We will also focus on a number of current hot topics in economics and finance: i) the growth of cryptocurrencies, ii) the rise of the internet giants (Google, Facebook, Amazon), iii) the increasing importance of intellectual property for firms and economies and iv) the economics of free trade in a world of rising trade barriers. For each topic we will discuss what economics and finance has to say about the causes of these phenomena and what their effects are on individuals, firms and the economy as a whole.  

This course provides an introduction to microeconomics and macroeconomics together at the beginner level, which attempt to understand the behavior of individual entities such as markets, firms, households, and the economy as a whole. It focuses on a core set of fundamental concepts that help understand a broad range of macroeconomic and macroeconomic issues: scarcity, trade-offs, opportunity cost, incentive, marginal thinking, exchange, efficiency, information, etc. (microeconomics), the determination of output, employment, unemployment, interest rates, and inflation, monetary and fiscal policies, etc. (macroeconomics).

This course provides students with a sound knowledge and understanding of the major results of environmental economics. It delivers the fundamentals of rigorous economic analysis for continued undergraduate studies at a higher level, or graduate studies of environmental economics.