COURSE DESCRIPTIONS

The courses offered in this program may change from year to year as student and faculty interests evolve. The courses listed below are the core courses and those designed specifically for this program. Additional courses of interest are offered throughout the University.

Economics 500 General Economic Theory: Microeconomics
Introduction to optimization methods and partial equilibrium. Theories of utility and consumer behavior, production and firm behavior. Introduction to uncertainty and the economics of information, and to non competitive market structures.

MGT 611 Policy Modeling
How can one estimate the number of people infected with AIDS? What is the best way to schedule a public housing redevelopment project? Does capital punishment deter homicide? These problems and more are considered in Policy Modeling. Building on earlier course work in quantitative analysis and statistics, Policy Modeling includes "back of the envelope" probabilistic models, Markov processes, queuing theory, and linear/integer programming. These techniques are applied to a number of important policy problems. In addition to lectures, assigned articles and text readings, and short problem sets, students will be responsible for completing a take-home midterm exam and a number of cases. In some instances, it will be possible to take a real problem from formulation to solution, and compare your own analysis to what actually happened.

MGT 710 Mathematical Models for Management
Students learn how to formulate and solve optimization problems. Topics covered include linear and integer programming, non-linear optimization, dynamic programming, and queueing theory. Many real problems from various areas in manufacturing and service operations are covered throughout the course.

MGMT 700 Seminar in Accounting Research I
MGMT 701 Seminar in Accounting Research II
MGMT 702 Seminar in Accounting Research III
MGMT 704 Seminar in Accounting Research IV
These courses examine research into accounting institutions. Topics are generally drawn from areas of income measurement, managerial evaluation, industry structure and regulation in the accounting industry, informational efficiency of public markets, and asset valuation models under incomplete markets.

MGMT 740 Financial Economics I
MGMT 741 Financial Economics II
These courses examine financial theory and its empirical validation. The first term covers single period models. Topics covered include arbitrage, utility representation, portfolio theory, risk, mean-variance analysis and the CAPM, and efficient markets. The second term concentrates on multi-period models. Topics covered include multi-period portfolio considerations, option pricing and contingent claims, the resolution of uncertainty, and the term structure of interest rates.

MGMT 742 Corporate Finance and Market Microstructure
This is a Ph.D. level course covering various topics in corporate finance and market microstructure. The goal of the course is to introduce students to the latest research in these areas via an analysis of recent journal articles and working papers. The corporate finance section of the course covers elementary game theory, optimal debt levels, event study methodology, bankruptcy laws and their impact on financial structure, security design, and initial public offers. The market microstructure section covers inventory models, trading on asymmetric information and its price impact, social welfare issues associated with insider trading, bid-ask spread, information disclosure, and socially optimal trading mechanisms.

MGMT 743 Topics in Empirical Asset Pricing
This is a doctoral level course in the empirical analysis of financial data. The course will cover some of the more important works in empirical asset pricing, beginning with the early development and tests of the efficient market paradigm, but will focus more on modern evidence and research on market efficiency, trading profits and information-based abritrage. The course will also cover common empirical methods and databases used in asset pricing. The course will require the reading of three to five research papers per week, presentations and class participation in discussions, referee reports, and a final empirical paper.

MGMT 745 Financial Behavior
Much of modern financial economics works with models in which agents are rational, in that they maximize expected utility and use Bayes' law to update their beliefs. Behavioral finance is a large and active field which studies models in which some agents are less than fully rational. Such models have two building blocks: limits to abritrage, which make it difficult for rational traders to undo the dislocations caused by less rational traders; and psychology, which catalogues the kinds of deviations from full rationality we might expect to see. We discuss these two topics, and then consider a number of applications: asset pricing (the aggregate stock market and the cross-section of average returns); individual trading behavior; and corporate finance (security issuance, corporate investment, and mergers).

MGMT 750 Seminar in Marketing I
MGMT 751 Seminar in Marketing II
Students and faculty discuss the current academic literature. The objective of the seminar is to provide students with a broad-based understanding of the scholarly literature in the marketing field and to encourage open discussion between faculty and students about substantive marking topics. Specific areas that are covered include consumer behavior; advertising and promotion; pricing; distribution; product planning and development; retailing; marketing strategy; and marketing research methodology. Scheduled meetings will include student presentations and general class discussion with faculty members, and visiting researchers.

MGMT 753 Behavioral Decision Making I
This seminar examines research on the psychology of decision making, focusing on choice. Although the normative issue of how decisions should be made is relevant, the descriptive issue of how decisions are made is the main focus of the course. Topics of discussion include decision framing and mental accounting, prospect theory and loss aversion, context effects, task effects, goal-directed choice, preference reversals, intertemporal choice, behavioral economics, and other topics. The goal of the seminar is threefold: to foster a critical appreciation of existing knowledge in behavioral decision theory, to develop the students’ skills in identifying and testing interesting research ideas, and to explore research opportunities for adding to that knowledge. Students generally enroll from a variety of disciplines, including cognitive and social psychology, behavioral economics, finance, marketing, political science, medicine and public health.

MGMT 754 Behavioral Decision Making II
This seminar examines research on the psychology of decision making, focusing on judgment. Although the normative issue of how decisions should be made is relevant, the descriptive issue of how decisions are made is the main focus of the course. Topics of discussion include judgment heuristics and biases, confidence and calibration, issues of well-being including predictions and experiences, regret and counterfactuals, and other topics. The goal of the seminar is threefold: to foster a critical appreciation of existing knowledge in behavioral decision theory, to develop the students’ skills in identifying and testing interesting research ideas, and to explore research opportunities for adding to that knowledge. Students generally enroll from a variety of disciplines, including cognitive and social psychology, behavioral economics, finance, marketing, political science, medicine and public health.

MGMT 758 Golden Eggs and Russian Roulette: Rational Choice in an Uncertain World.
All serious choices involve outcomes that are uncertain or delayed, or both.  Thus, rational choice requires procedures for both incorporating risk and for trading off costs and benefits occurring at different times.  In this class, we explore the history of thought on these topics, and discuss the dominant prescriptive models (which aim to describe what decision makers should do) and descriptive models (which aim to describe what decision makers actually do). We incorporate perspectives from economics, decision theory, finance, and psychology, and engage long-standing philosophical debates about rational choice.  Topics include: discount rates, the discounted utility model, self control, affective forecasting, hyperbolic discounting, intergenerational choice, expected value, expected utility, risk aversion, loss aversion, insurance, gambling, decision trees, the expected value of perfect information, prospect theory, subjective probability, overconfidence, ambiguity, "neuroeconomics," and the wisdom (or stupidity) of crowds.