Selection of English taught courses at Master s level

Transcription

1 Selection of English taught courses at Master s level Faculty of and

2 Faculty of and Advanced of the Environment The course revises and familiarizes students with the economic analysis of pollution and pollution control. The students learn how to identify the efficient amount of pollution, which instruments can be used to regulate pollution (command-and-control regulation, taes, emissions permits) and which practical difficulties can arise when designing effective regulations. The course takes a more advanced look at the economic consequences of taation, uncertainty about abatement costs and pollution damage, and certain problems that arise when using marketable permits, such as market power. The students also learn about the differences between local pollution and transboundary pollution, which instruments can be used to regulate transboundary pollution, and which difficulties arise for those issues. Advanced Supply Chain The course covers the topics of supply chain management in base-of-the-pyramid markets, supply chain management of minerals, measuring performance in (sustainable) supply chains, and accounting and accountability in supply chains. Behavioral Milestones Behavioral economics is a flourishing and influential field of research; it is impossible to cover it comprehensively in one single course. Hence I focus on milestones, which might be either researchers (like Daniel Kahneman, Herbert Simon, Gary Becker or Thomas Schelling), tools for research (like the ultimatum game and cross cultural eperiments) or modelling approaches (like multiple selves). Business Model Innovation Business models have become a popular and powerful concept in corporate practice to describe, run and develop a firm s value creation and capture. Furthermore, business models emerged as new unit of analysis for innovation in consequence of firms need to adapt and innovate their established business models. A new stream of academic research at the intersection of strategy, organization, entrepreneurship, innovation and technology management has emerged. Participants will become familiar with the stateof-the art in research on business models and business model innovation. They will learn to understand and reflect different business model understandings and their particular use cases. Furthermore, they will learn about the particularities of special business model types such as sharing economy, digital platform, and social or open business models. Furthermore, we will discuss the challenges and advantages of managing multiple business models or of dealing with competing institutional logics within one business model. This is complemented by a variety of creativity techniques and tools to create eplore and eploit business model innovation opportunities. Cross-cultural Issues in Business Psychology What does culture mean, how can we understand and compare it and is that even necessary? What does international mean and which characteristics and abilities make me international? After having answered these questions, we will discuss the topics of cross-cultural trainings and of negotiation processes. We will then try to find a connection between theory and practice. Economic and Monetary Union Since the beginning of the worldwide financial crises, Economic and Monetary Unions (EMU) like the Eurozone have gained particular interest for politicians and economists. The course Economic and Monetary Union is concerned with the arrangement and constitution of Monetary Unions and aims at shedding light on three core components. The first part of the lecture deals with some preliminary characteristics of Economic and Monetary Unions and points out the costs and benefits of Monetary Unions, its core characteristics and debates the question whether the Eurozone can be seen as an optimal currency union. The second part is concerned with the most important aspects of EMUs, the monetary as well as fiscal policy. Students will get an insight into optimal monetary and fiscal policy in a currency union, the eceptional monetary policy measures at the zero lower bound and the core characteristics of central bank communication, transparency and reputation. The course concludes with several aspects concerning crises and sheds light on the European sovereign debt crisis, the Quantitative Easing policies of the FED and ECB as well as sudden stops in EMUs, current account imbalances and Target2-issues. of Entrepreneurship Entrepreneurship is a major driving force in dynamic economies and an important objective of policy makers worldwide. Following decades of virtual neglect of the topic, the last years have seen a surge of research on entrepreneurship in economics as well as related fields such as management, psychology and geography. This course will provide an introduction to the essential economic theories and empirical studies analyzing the phenomenon of entrepreneurship. The course agenda covers a broad range of topics including determinants of new venture creation, the financing of entrepreneurship, business performance, the economic relevance of entrepreneurship and entrepreneurship policies. The lectures will combine overviews of the respective topics with detailed discussions of the methods and findings of eemplary studies. 1

3 Faculty of and of Science and Technology Innovation drives growth and job creation in modern economies. A major share of the new knowledge on which innovation is based derives from scientific research. Understanding the economics of science and the processes in which new scientific knowledge is transferred to the economy is therefore of major importance to eplain and possibly improve innovation performance. At the same time, knowledge is a good with rather unusual properties that raise various types of eternalities and incentive problems. With the system of Open Science, a specific set of institutions has developed over time that address these issues. Studying Open Science therefore helps economists to better understand the working of competitively self-governing systems. Before this background it is little surprising that a burgeoning literature deals with the economics of science. The course will provide an introduction into this research. Energy The course eamines the economics of markets for a number of energy sources such as coal, oil, natural gas, electricity and renewables. It discusses aspects of energy demand and efficiency, energy taes, regulation and public policies for greenhouse gas emission control. European Consumer Law (3 ECTS) /3. term This course will cover the legal framework of European Consumer Law, and topics of the European Private Law such as sales law, unfair contract terms law, the pre-contractual stage, the proposal for a Common European Sales Law, unfair commercial practices, financial services law, travel law, services of general interest, and enforcement issues. European Corporate Law Foundations of Eperimental (3 ECTS) The course offers an introduction to European company law. It covers the following subjects: introduction to European and comparative company law, corporate restructuring and mobility, competition of rules, European business forms, and corporate governance: boards and shareholder rights. The course focuses on primary and secondary EU-legislation, case law of the Court of Justice of the European Union and legislation of relevant jurisdictions. The aim of this course is to introduce students to the basic ideas and the principles of eperimental economics. Students will learn the rules of how to design economic eperiments and about how they are evaluated. Every student is required to perform an eperiment (with the other participants as subjects), analyze the data thereby obtained and present the results, comparing them to those of earlier eperiments reported in the literature. All that is group work. Every student on his (or her) own writes a seminar paper. Industrial Dynamics In recent years, a rich theoretical and empirical literature on industrial dynamics and industry life cycles has been developed to complement the game-theoretic models of contemporary research on industrial organization. This literature has yielded important new insights into the conditions and dynamics of entry, eit, market structure and innovation activities in competitive industries. Mary approaches to industrial dynamics have highlighted the relevance of firm heterogeneity. At the same time, the research on industrial dynamics is closely related to the current work on entrepreneurship and also to strategic management research. Intermediate Public The course covers essential concepts in Public (public goods, taation, federalism, political economy). A special focus rests on the application of graphical and analytical tools. The application of these tools is trained in eercise session. In addition, we will work through empirical studies on selected concepts. Labor Understanding the role of labor market institutions is a difficult but central task. Good institutions can alleviate the adverse effects of the many imperfections that characterize labor markets. But, unfortunately, bad institutions can, and often do, make things worse. The course will eamine the many institutions that affect the behavior of workers and employers in imperfect labor markets, and thus touch upon a number of important issues in labor economics: minimum wages, employment protection legislation, unemployment benefits, active labor market policies, collective bargaining, early retirement programs, education and migration policies, payroll taes, and employment-conditional incentives. In order to accurately characterize the effects of these institutions, the course relies on simple yet state-of-the-art theory and and provides empirical reviews of evidence. Law and / Public Choice This course covers the basic assumptions and concepts of Law and (rationality assumption, methodological individualism, evolutionary Law and ) and their application to different fields of law. In its Public-Choice part the course deals with the economic analysis of decision-making in polities, in particular the economic theory of elections and votes, including the relevant concepts of power, the theory of stakeholder groups (organizability of interests, influence of associations, and economic development), the positive economic theory of regulation, theory of bureaucracy, and the economics of constitutions. Students may choose either the entire course or only the Law-and- or the Public-Choice part (3 ECTS each). 2

4 Faculty of and Micro-econometrics + eercise This direction of econometrics eamines cross-sectional micro data, i.e. data from persons, households, firms, but also from regions, countries, or even supermarketscanner data. Empirical analyses with microdata and thus microeconometrics are often not based on quantitative continuous dependent variables with an unrestricted range, but on other types of dependent variables, i.e. qualitative (categorial) variables as well as quantitative variables which are not continuous or with a restricted range. This course provides an overview of the most important estimation methods and test procedures in selected microeconometric models. The focus will be on the practical application of the main concepts by analyzing real datasets using the statistical software Stata. Population / This combined seminar and lecture will eamine the economic determinants and consequences of population change and demographic behavior including household formation, marriage, child bearing and rearing, mortality and key forms of human capital investment including schooling and migration. We will apply analytical tools of economics to investigate various economic and social consequences of population change. The consequences studied include the economic impact of immigrants on native workers and tapayers; population aging and fiscal sustainability, and the likely effect of government policies in support of families. Program Evaluation Methods / This course will introduce students to the most important approaches of program evaluation. These approaches have been widely used in the economics literature in diverse fields (development, labor, public economics, economics of education and health) and can be applied to a wide range of questions such as evaluating the effects of anti- poverty programs (e.g. conditional cash transfer programs), educational and job training programs, preventative health care and family planning programs, of changes in laws such as minimum wage laws and minimum drinking age and so forth. The challenge in the literature on program evaluation consists of how to address the problem of the missing counterfactual: To evaluate the impact of a program it is necessary to not only know the outcome of the individual in the presence of the program, but to also know what the outcome would have been in the absence of the program ( counterfactual ). The problem is that individuals are never observed in both states (presence and absence of program) at the same time. Therefore the goal of all the approaches discussed in this course (and in fact one of the main challenges in economics in general) is to derive appropriate counterfactuals under different assumptions. The different available approaches require very different assumptions and have different data requirements. The goal of this course is to guide students in acquiring a solid understanding of the different approaches, so that they are able to read and understand the program evaluation literature from different areas of economics. Moreover, students will get an understanding of the econometric issues that arise in program evaluation, which puts them into the position to critically assess the appropriateness and credibility of impact assessment studies. Quantitative Methods of Eperimental The unit consists of three parts. Part I is an introductory lecture on eperimental methods and designs. In addition individual topics are assigned. Part II consists of a block course in which students run the individually assigned eperiments. In addition, thre is a lecture on data analysis of eperiments. On part III, students present the eperimental results of their own eperiments run in part II, combined with a lecture on how to write a paper on eperimental results. Recent Developments in Forecasting Methods with Empirical Applications Recent developments in forecasting methods state that a better forecast can be achieved rather through the combination of different models than by the use of one individual model. Many theoretical and empirical studies have indeed shown that certain application of different combinations so-called model-averaging of individual models can dominate individual forecasts in many different areas of economics and finance. The goal of this course is to introduce students to the theory of optimal forecast combination and to allow students to become familiar with it. After that, a statisticssoftware will be introduced through a practical application of model-averaging so that students can carry out an empirical project on the basis of certain empirical data. Research Methods in Business Risk The seminar deals with the basics of (empirical) research in business studies. A wide range of topics such as basic research strategies, planning of research projects, and issues in quantitative and qualitative will be covered. Students will, amongst other things, learn how to distinguish good quality research from mediocre approaches and how to avoid pitfalls. After a short introduction, the course will cover the topics of risk management: process and tools, regulatory requirements, and risk measurement techniques. 3

5 Faculty of and Social Policy / The course looks at the idea of social welfare and its relationship to politics and the society. It also considers detailed issues on policy and administration of social services, the economic theory of state intervention and public vs. private insurance. Net, the lecture looks at different risks that can generate a need to offer some kind of public insurance. In particular, we will discuss how to (best) deal with the risks of longevity, health, non-employment, and children. This leads us to the fields of statutory pension insurance, health insurance, unemployment insurance, social welfare, and family related policies. The course objective is understanding spatial econometric methods and their application with R. Spatial Econometrics Strategic Human Resource every 3. term Students will be required to search for relevant literature with regard to specific topics in the range of Human Resource. They will author a seminar paper in which they refer to and reflect on publications from international journals. Strategies and Practices in International Directmarketing The concept of the International Direct Marketing seminar is to develop a tetbook focused on Direct Marketing, which may be published in the web or publishing house. We are working in seven groups of four students on the following content: international marketing, decisions for internationalization, strategies of internationalization, culture, analyzing consumer behavior in foreign markets, the international marketing-mi, international customer relations management, BOP: direct marketing from a different perspective, and future trends in direct marketing. Supply Chain The unit consists of lectures covering the following topics: introduction to terminology, supply chain and operations strategy, theoretical foundations of supply chain management, supply chain processes, supplier selection and evaluation, logistics and distribution management, supply chain performance and management control, supply chain risk management, and sustainable supply chain management. Targeting Marketing communication is likely to become a mutual beneficial interaction, if, and only if, the customers are willing to be engaged in the interaction. Customers motivation is varying with the products category s relevance, their brand attachment, their media preferences, etc. In this seminar, the students learn how to assess and evaluate the customers profiles from commonly available databases in distance selling, e-commerce and mobile commerce. For evaluating the data students apply scoring, discriminant analysis (linear, non-linear & fuzzy), discrete choice models (logit & probit), multi-layer perceptrons, association analysis (a-priori algorithm) and rough sets using r packages. Additionally we discuss finite miture modeling and hierarchical Bayes modeling with brugs. Privacy considerations and data protection as well as an introduction to the concepts of data mining, big data, and the translation analytical results into marketing communication measures complement the technical content of the seminar. 4