2013-14 Catalog: Business Economics & Management

This class provides the opportunity for students to improve their written and oral presentation skills in the social sciences. Students should come prepared with complete drafts of papers from another course or a SURF project, which they will substantially revise and improve in a style typical of peer-reviewed journals in their discipline. These papers must be the students' original work and must be papers with social science content. An initial introduction to the art of scientific writing will be provided by the staff of the Hixon Writing Center. In addition, each student will work closely with an HSS mentor whose own research is close to the student's paper topic. Fulfills the Institute scientific writing requirement and the option oral presentation requirement for HSS majors.

This course offers advanced undergraduates the opportunity to pursue research on a business problem individually or in a small group. Graded pass/fail.

Topics to be determined by instructor.

An introduction to accounting in business. Topics include financial accounting, cost accounting.

An introduction to corporate finance. Economic theory is used to study asset valuation and financial decision making in business. Topics include financial decision making under certainty, introduction to valuation of risky assets (stocks and bonds), the corporate investment decision, dividend policy, and the corporate financing decision.

Examines the theory of financial decision making and statistical techniques useful in analyzing financial data. Topics include portfolio selection, equilibrium security pricing, empirical analysis of equity securities, fixed-income markets, market efficiency, and risk management.

An introduction to modern option pricing theory. The focus is the valuation of contingent claims. Both American and European options are considered. The binomial and Black-Scholes option pricing models are derived. The theory is also applied to risky debt and portfolio choice.

This course develops concepts appropriate for formulating strategy in a competitive environment, using a combination of case analysis and lectures. The course covers differentiation strategies, positioning to neutralize incumbency advantages, the product life cycle, organizational design as competitive strategy, signaling, cooperation strategies, pricing and price discrimination as competitive strategy, strategic use of option theory, and the war of attrition.

This course builds on the concepts introduced in BEM 103 and applies them to current issues related to the financial management, regulation, and governance of both ongoing corporations and new start-up companies. The fundamental theme is valuation. The course discusses how valuation is affected by, among others, the role of directors, regulation of mergers and acquisitions, and management incentives.

An introduction to the models of interest rates and credit/default risk. The focus is on continuous time models used in Wall Street practice for pricing and hedging fixed income securities. Two main models for credit risk are considered: structural and reduced form.

An introduction to financial risk management. Concepts of Knightian risk and uncertainty; coherent risk; and commonly used metrics for risk. Techniques for estimating equity risk; volatility; correlation; interest rate risk; and credit risk are described. Discussions of fat-tailed (leptokurtic) risk, scenario analysis, and regime-switching methods provide an introduction to methods for dealing with risk in extreme environments.

This class studies the relationships among business, government, and interest groups as strategic actors in the nonmarket environment. Methods of influencing public policy are analyzed using the tools of modern political theory and economics frameworks. Topics may include media, private collective action, international business, and corporate social responsibility. Two written assignments will be collected and graded each week.

An introduction to the analysis, design, and management of organizations with an emphasis on incentives and information. Principles from economics, political science, and game theory will be applied to problems in project and team management, in organizational computing, and in allocating and pricing shared facilities.

This class teaches how to use very large, cross-media datasets to infer what variables influence choices and trends of economic and business interest. Topics include database management, cleaning and visualization of data, statistical and machine learning methods, natural language processing, social and conventional media, personal sensors and devices, sentiment analysis, and controlled collection of data (including experiments). Grades are based on hands-on data analysis homework assignments and detailed analysis of one dataset.

This course offers advanced undergraduates the opportunity to pursue research on a business problem individually or in small groups. Graded pass/fail.