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 »
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 Stephen Peake »
Judge Business School

Introduction to Technology Policy

This course is an introduction to science and technology public policy, civics, leadership, policy analysis and the law, and also includes elements of strategy.

The course provides an introduction to some of central themes of the MPhil in Technology Policy. It adopts a professional practice approach and, as such, stresses career-relevant insights and skills over comprehensive and reflective scholarship.

The objectives of the course include:

• Literacy in the field of public policy
• Understanding of the processes of policy-making, competence in communicating with policy makers
• Insights into leadership in technology strategy
• Literacy regarding the relationship of the law and technology

Course Leader
Dr Bill Nuttall »
Dr David Reiner »
Judge Business School

Political Economy of Technology Policy

Technology and innovation are widely regarded as the engines of firm and nationwide sustainable competitive advantage. In this context, technology policy, defined broadly to include innovation policy, can be an important determinant of success or failure for firms, regions and nations.

This course provides you with an understanding of the alternative and complementary economics and political science-based conceptual foundations of technology policy and their application to a wide variety of cases in both economic and social regulation.

Course Leader
Dr Christos Pitelis »
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 »
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 »
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 »
Judge Business School

Marketing

Among business disciplines, marketing is the primary contact point between a business and its customers. Nearly everybody will, at some point in their career, wear a marketing hat. Understanding marketing will help you whether you want to be an accountant, a movie producer, an engineer, a programmer, a banker, or a museum curator. Understanding customer needs and how to marshal the resources of an organisation to meet those needs will enhance students' chances of career success. This course develops a general management viewpoint in planning and evaluating marketing decisions, from both strategic and tactical perspectives.

This course will also help you understand how marketing decisions are affected by organisational and environmental influences.

Course Leader
Dr Vincent Mak »
Judge Business School

Complexity & Negotiation

The course equips you with negotiation and strategic skills relevant to high technology organisations, such as those negotiations within the firm (e.g. between management and labour), those between firms (as occurs in the building of industrial consortia), and those between firms and government agencies.

Strategic issues covered include situations of conflict and cooperation under a range of assumptions about timing of actions and the kind of knowledge available to decision makers.

The course also includes an introduction to 'complexity', considering the science of complexity; chaos, fractals, emergence, self-organisation, and so on. Links and inferences are made to social complexity and issues relating to negotiations.

Course Leaders
Dr David Reiner »
Dr Bill Nuttall »
Judge Business School

Management Consulting Project

This course provides you with a unique opportunity to apply theory to the practice of management. It involves working in teams to solve a business problem, following which you'll present your analysis and results in an oral presentation to an invited audience.

The course will will:

• Deepen your understanding of professional management practice
• Develop your skills in organisational problem diagnosis and solutions
• Enhance personal development in networking and presentation skills

By the end of the course you will be able to:

• Identify and apply relevant tools and techniques of strategic and organisational analysis
• Conceptualise the nature of organisational problems and their solution
• Generate and evaluate alternative solutions to an organisational problem
• Recommend a plan of action appropriate to solving an organisational problem
• Design an appropriate action plan for implementing a solution to an organisational problem

Course Leader
Dr Jochen Menges »
Judge Business School

Operations Management

Course description to follow.

Course Leader
Judge Business School