International Business

You’ll have the option of taking courses that address your individual career choices. Samples include:

• Understanding Central Banks - This course brings together topics in macroeconomics, international economics, and finance to look at central banks, which are often dominant players in financial markets and provide a framework for understanding their actions. You will gain an overview of the key issues that confront all central banks. Then you will spend time seeing how the Federal Reserve, the Bank of Japan, and the European Central Bank resolve these issues. We contrast their approaches with those taken by central banks in other industrialized countries and in developing countries. We also study how central banks' actions interact with asset markets. There will be two guest speakers who are prominent members of the world's central banking community.
• International Financial Policy - You will develop an understanding of issues in international macroeconomics that are important for managers operating in the global marketplace. The course covers theories of the determination of exchange rates and interest rates, the management of foreign exchange risk, international capital flows, debt and currency crises, international monetary and exchange rate regimes, the roles of the international financial institutions in developing countries, and other characteristics of international financial markets.
• Managing the Firm in the Global Economy - This course will study international economics from the perspective of the firm. The objective is to become familiar with organizational, financial, and legal issues that firms face in foreign markets. To this end, we will analyze conceptual frameworks that guide firms’ decision to expand globally through exporting, investing, or forming alliances. We will address questions such as: how do firms decide to export and where to export? What is the rationale behind the common organizational forms (joint ventures with local partners vs. wholly-owned foreign subsidiaries) we see in foreign operations? What factors determine the location choice for investing abroad? We will also investigate, in depth, some of the key issues multinational firms face: intellectual property rights in foreign markets, financial and operational hedging techniques to manage exchange rate risk, international tax planning, political risk and corruption in international business. Part of the course will be devoted to the analysis of the business environment and management practices in developing countries.
• The Wealth of Nations - Why is the United States the wealthiest country in the world? How can we understand the emergence of China and India in the last two decades? What explains growth disasters of countries such as Venezuela and sub-Saharan Africa? Why has Brazil not emerged as a growth miracle despite its enormous potential? We will develop an analytical framework to examine the role of financial markets, labor market regulations, tax policy, and trade policy in understanding a country's growth experience.