Electives

Globalisation at the Crossroads

This course is being delivered at a time of immense significance in world history. The so-called Washington Consensus world view has dominated the epoch of capitalist globalisation which began in the late 1970s. This view is now in tatters. This course analyses the rise to domination of this perspective, the reasons for its current crisis and the prospects for global political economy.

Assessed by essay.

Course Leader
Professor Peter Nolan »
Cambridge Judge Business School

Environment & Sustainability

This course helps you understand the principles underlying various environmental issues, and the uses and limitations of numerical information in addressing these issues.

Course Leader
Dr Chris Hope »
Cambridge Judge Business School

Strategic Valuation

This course introduces you to the real options paradigm as a project design and evaluation tool. This paradigm emphasises the value of flexibility in project design and appraisal.

Flexibility enables active risk and opportunity management as it allows engineers and managers to adapt the system in different ways, depending on how the future unfolds. Research and development (R&D) projects, for example, give companies the option of a future launch of a product, which they may or may not exercise, depending on the success of R&D and on market conditions. Similarly, building a small plant with an expansion option as opposed to building a big plant from the start gives the project manager the flexibility to expand if demand is high, without committing to high capacity a priori, thus avoiding "white elephants". Thus, flexibility has value.

Flexibility also, however, costs money: R&D expenditure, for example in the biotech industry, can be huge. By building small and allowing for expansion the company foregoes the economies of scale of building one large plant.

So how much flexibility shall we built into the system? System designers and project managers need tools that help them decide if added flexibility is worth the money. This course will provide you with a mindset and a suite of tools to tackle such problems. You are expected to be familiar with probability and statistics at the level of an introductory undergraduate course.

Course Leader
Dr Houyuan Jiang »
Cambridge Judge Business School

Financial Markets, Risk & Regulation

This course gives you an insight into the operation of financial markets and their impact on economic behaviour and examines important contemporary policy issues. An important component of financial policy is the management of systemic risk; understanding it requires learning both the basics of macro-financial analysis, and micro-financial pricing theory. The integration of the two provides a framework for the examination of efficiencies and inefficiencies in financial markets and the policy response from central banks and regulators.

You will learn basic national income accounting and flow of funds analysis, core concepts of macroeconomics and basic asset pricing theory, and how to analyse the interactions of financial agents via beauty contests and herding. You will also learn something of the structure of financial institutions, and of policy questions faced in the management of systemic risk.

Course Leader
Professor Lord Eatwell »
Cambridge Judge Business School

Financial Reporting & Capital Markets

The Financial Reporting & Capital Markets course looks at:

• Financial markets and the decisions informed by accounting data: subscription of new capital; market for corporate control; markets for debt and for executives
• The efficient markets hypothesis
• The general allocation problem with just semi-strong efficiency
• Insider trading as a means of information release
• Consequences of information asymmetry: plunder of principals' funds; misinformed investment decisions; withdrawal of investors from the market
• Responding to information asymmetry: search; signalling; incentive contracts; audit; regulation
• Creative accounting in an efficient market
• Analysis of a series of case studies (recent UK and US company reports) grouped according to whether, first, cash flows are affected and, second, whether the creative accounting device is transparent
• Fundamental values vs. market prices; dividend discount and dividend yield valuation models; sources of dividend growth; rate of return spread; interpretation of the price-earnings (PE) ratio; fundamentals of financial statements - accruals and cash flows; clean surplus accounting; the price-book value ratio; economic and accounting concepts of income; reporting financial performance; internal rate of return vs. accounting rate of return; abnormal earnings valuation model; Ohlson's abnormal earnings model; economic value added; shareholder value and enterprise value models

Students taking this course should already have taken either the Introduction to Financial Reporting course (if on the MPhil in Finance programme) or the Finance & Accounting course (if on the MPhil in Management programme).

Assessed by essay.

Course Leader
Professor Geoff Meeks »
Cambridge Judge Business School

Human Resources Management

The course asks: how can organisations harness the productive potential of employees in order to achieve superior performance? Its principal aims:

1. to provide students with a broad and critical understanding of the key problems and concepts underpinning human resources management (HRM)
2. to ensure that students have an understanding of the psychological bases of HRM
3. to establish an understanding for the wide array of HRM practices and their specific configuration according to the organisation's strategic orientation
4. to demonstrate the importance of HRM in competitive contexts and to understand the association between HRM and performance

Course Leader
Dr Jochen Menges »
Cambridge Judge Business School

Social Networks & Organisations

This course familiarises you with the theory, research and method issues connected with social network analysis in organisational contexts. Upon completion of the course, you will have a good grasp of social network concepts and methods, and be able to use them to conduct research.

Course Leader
Professor Martin Kilduff »
Cambridge Judge Business School