You'll have the chance to explore activities outside the classroom in numerous ways that will also allow you to build new skills, relationships, and networks. These include:
- Managerial Effectiveness Group - The Managerial Effectiveness Group aims to develop better managers and leaders by helping students develop and polish their "soft-skill" repertoire. Our focus is on interpersonal communication, conflict management, group-skills, influencing, motivation, and other such soft-skills.
- Behavioral Science Workshop - Invited guests, faculty, and students present current research in decision-making and judgment at the Behavioral Science Workshop. The emphasis is on behavioral implications of decision/judgment models.
You’ll have the option of taking courses that address your individual career choices. Samples include:
- The Employment Relationship - Labor accounts for more than half of a typical firm's costs. This course examines the market in which the firm and its workforce interact. The course uses economics, and a discussion of legal institutions to build a deeper understanding of this relationship. In particular, we will discuss discrimination, employment litigation, international trade, outsourcing, off-shoring, unions and union-organizing activity, minimum wages, overtime, termination, and employee benefits. Throughout the course, we will also discuss practical ways to use data to uncover important causal relationships and to distinguish them from correlations.
- Managing the Workplace - This course examines foundational topics in human resource management with a focus on coordinating human resource practices and business strategy. Topics covered include employee selection and retention, training and development, performance evaluation, compensation, job design, and communications within the firm.
- Management, Unions, and Collective Bargaining - This course concentrates first on a detailed examination of union organization, contract bargaining, and the exercise of power by unions. Also, we analyze the current debate between "left" and "right" over the nature and effect of our structure of labor law in the US. Next, we make an in-depth analysis of the implementation and enforcement of the labor contract with emphasis on the all-important process of labor arbitration. The class surveys more briefly: (a) the growth, decline, government, and philosophy of unions in the US; (b) the unique problems of bargaining in the public sector; and (c) the economic consequences of collective bargaining in the US.
You’ll study with professors who conduct groundbreaking research, consult with companies and share their experience shaping the use of human capital as a strategic resource.
Canice Prendergast, W. Allen Wallis Professor of Economics and Booth Faculty Fellow, is widely published, with work appearing in the Economic Journal, theJournal of Labor Economics, the American Economic Review, the Journal of the Japanese and International Economics, and the European Economic Review. Articles on his recent research have appeared in Fortune Magazine, theFinancial Times, the Economist, and Der Speigel.