The environment a firm competes and finances itself in, taken from two angles. At the firm level: how pricing power is exercised in practice, how regulation and externalities reshape the payoff to a business line, and how managers commit capital under risk and uncertainty. At the market level: how monetary and fiscal policy transmit through interest rates and demand to a company's margins, financing conditions, and cash flows.
The opportunities, problems, and financial decisions confronting multinational companies. The course covers international financial markets, regulatory and environmental differences across countries, the use of derivatives to hedge exchange-rate risk, exposure to political and other risks, and international diversification.
Course project — Country FX Risk and MNC Exposure. Teams of three to four students take one country and work through its balance of payments, its exchange-rate regime and currency history, and the drivers that could plausibly move the currency, ending in a scenario-based outlook for the year ahead. They then choose a US-listed multinational with meaningful exposure to that country and trace how the currency risk actually reaches its business. The result is a report and a presentation, built on data the students collect themselves.
An introduction to corporate finance: the core tools behind the decisions a financial manager has to make — the firm's objectives, the time value of money, discounted cash flow, the valuation of bonds and stocks, risk and return, the cost of capital and capital budgeting, capital structure, dividend policy, and ethics in finance. Students also apply financial statement analysis to a publicly traded firm in a group case study.
Intermediate macroeconomic theory, taught from Blanchard: output, unemployment, and inflation in the short, medium, and long run, the IS-LM framework, the open economy, and the conduct of monetary and fiscal policy. The course keeps one foot in the incoming data throughout.
Data update. Each class opened with a five-minute data update delivered by a student, working from the New York Fed and MarketWatch economic calendars. Students tracked the major U.S. releases — initial claims, CPI, the JOLTS report, the employment situation, personal income and the PCE deflator, GDP releases and revisions, and FOMC decisions — and explained to the class what the number actually meant. FOMC meetings carrying projections and the dot plot were covered by two students.