Results for MGTECON

This course covers microeconomic concepts relevant to managerial decision making. Topics include: demand and supply analysis; consumer demand theory; production theory; price discrimination; perfect competition; partial equilibrium welfare analysis; externalities and public goods; risk aversion and risk sharing; hidden information and signaling; moral hazard and incentives; game theory; oligopoly; and auctions.

MGTECON 203 is the accelerated option in microeconomics for 1st year MBA students. It will cover the usual array of topics covered in microeconomics, with an emphasis on topics more useful for students of management. Tentative plans are to "reverse" the usual flow of topics, beginning with the economics of small numbers interactions (using the language of non-cooperative game theory and emphasizing the economics of information and transactions costs), moving in the end to markets with large numbers of participants (perfect competition and variants). In comparison with MGTECON 200, less time will be spent in class (and in preparation) on basic problems, and more time will be spent on case studies. Therefore, students choosing this option should be able to do basic problems "on their own." Useful background includes a previous course in microeconomics and/or proficiency at simple differential calculus; either may be sufficient, but students without either should elect 200. A good diagnostic is to read Chapter 3 ("Marginal This and Marginal That") in Kreps, Microeconomics for Managers. If you find this relatively easy, 203 is a good choice. (Students with very strong background in microeconomics should take the Advanced Applications option.) If you find this a struggle, 200 is the right course for you.

The first portion of this course covers business decision making within the firm; behavior of individual markets reacting to supply and demand forces; consequences of alternative market structures and business policies; and interactions between the public and private sectors. Specific topics include supply and demand analysis, consumer behavior, theory of cost and production, pricing and competition, factor pricing, and the concepts of marginal analysis. The second portion covers the macro, or aggregative, aspects of the economy. Specific topics include national income accounts; the determination of the level of aggregate output, employment, and prices; the monetary system, including the effects of monetary policy; fiscal policy; economic growth; and international monetary economics.

This course gives students the background they need to understand the broad movements in the global economy. Key topics include long-run economic growth, technological change, wage inequality, international trade, interest rates, inflation, exchange rates, and monetary policy. By the end of the course, students should be able to read and understand the discussions of economic issues in The Economist, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, or the Congressional Budget Office.

This is an advanced applications economics course that applies recent innovations and high-powered tools to organization and general management. MBA1 students must have a strong background in microeconomics to take the course and should consult with their advisors. The course is appropriate for all MBA2 students. The course objective is to equip managers with an extensive set of analytical and applicable tools for handling the following topics: organization for coordination, designing incentives for moral hazard, monitoring and private information, applications to scope, scale, global management and mergers, principles for allocating decision power, managing supplier relations, downstream controls, franchising and alliances, bargaining, repeated interactions and reputation, holdups and strategizing with unawareness. These topics will be covered in a combination of lectures and cases.

This course provides the legal, instititional, and economic background necessary to understand the financing and production of health services in the US. Potential topics include: health reform, health insurance (Medicare and Medicaid, employer-sponsored insurance, the uninsured), medical malpractice and quality regulation, pharmaceuticals, the corporate practice of medicine, regulation of fraud and abuse, and international comparisons. nnnThis course is cross-listed with the GSB, and the Health Research Policy and Public Policy Departments (Same as MGTECON 331, HRP 391 and PUBLPOL 231).

For graduate students. The principal evaluative techniques for health care, including utility assessment, cost-effectiveness analysis, cost-benefit analysis, and decision analysis. Emphasis is on the practical application of these techniques. Group project presented at end of quarter. Guest lectures by experts from the medical school, pharmaceutical industry, health care plans, and government.

Economic issues permeate all that happens in government. This topics-based course will exam a variety of historic and current issues on the political agenda where economics is central to decision making. It is taught by faculty who served at the White House in either the Clinton or George W. Bush Administration.

Need approval from sponsoring faculty member and GSB Registrar.

This class will bring together GSB professors from several disciplines to explore the causes and consequences of the global financial crisis. The current plans are outlined below. However, because of the changing nature of the topic and some pending conflicts in participants' schedules, details may vary slightly. There will be reading assigned for each class and students will make a short presentation on the last day.nnnMONDAY: Peter DeMarzo on Securitization - This session will start with a review of the timeline of key events in the financial crisis. Then we will discuss the role of securitization in the crisis, how policy makers should regulate securitization, and how the private sector can use securitization going forward.nnnTUESDAY: Chad Jones on the Macroeconomy - This session will provide a macroeconomic analysis of the global financial crisis. What caused the crisis, where does the economy currently stand, and, most speculatively, what are the prospects going forward? We will document key macroeconomic facts related to GDP growth, employment, and inflation and consider how monetary policy, fiscal policy, and financial policy affect the economy.nnnWEDNESDAY: Paul Oyer on the Labor Market - We will discuss what government policies should be put in place relating to labor markets, including unemployment benefits and compensation regulations at financial institutions (especially those receiving government assistance). We will also discuss some of the personnel challenges and opportunities that come with managing during a major recession, including layoffs, taking advantage of hiring opportunities, and adopting incentive structures to the environment.nnnTHURSDAY: David Larcker on Accounting and Corporate Governance - We will discuss how accounting rules (such as mark-to-market) are affecting financial institutions and how regulators should respond. We will also discuss governance problems at these institutions and possible approaches to addressing these problems going forward.nnnFRIDAY: Part 1: Darrell Duffie on Financial Institutions - During this financial crisis, we have seen more than once that when a large dealer bank's capital becomes thin, the bank may fail catastrophically. In this segment of the course, we will review the "failure mechanics," tracing out the steps by which a dealer bank goes from fragility to failure. This segment will include some proposals for how to design more stable capital structures for large financial institutions.nnnFRIDAY: Part 2: Students will present proposals regarding various aspects of the crisis. Details will be described on the first day of class.

The course will review the results from a large management practices project involving Harvard, the London School of Economics, McKinsey & Company and Stanford. McKinsey & Company have developed a basic management practice evaluation tool - detailing the 18 key practices in firms - which has been used to evaluate almost 10,000 organizations in manufacturing, retail, healthcare and education across the US, Europe, Asia, Australasia and South America. These results provide a global insight into the basic management practices around monitoring, targets and talent management that firms adopt around the world, their link to performance, and the reasons for differences in these across countries. This will be supplemented with the results from more recent research with Accenture and the World Bank in India carrying out change-management interventions. nnnThe course will be take about 15 hours, and will focus on four areas:nnn1. Science of Management Practices:nnThe key practices that appear to help determine company performance. A combination of a detailed discussion of the management practice grid, class examples and self-scoring, and results from the research work on the 10,000 firms. The aim is to cover the basic management practice evaluation tool that can be used to perform an initial overview of the management practices of any organization. For example, this would be ideal for an initial evaluation of the management practices in a private equity target company or a preliminary evaluation of a potential client by a consulting firm.nn nn2. Why management practices vary across industries and countries:nnThe addresses the question on why so many firms around the world appear not to be adopting management best practices? The aim is to explain why organizations often are unable to adopt managerial best practices and what types of actions can help to address this. For example, what is the role of family, government and private equity ownership on management practices, how do labor market regulations in countries like France and Germany affect management, does the shortage of skilled employees in Brazil matter for good management, what is the potential impact of increasing trade competition on firms practices, and why are public sector organizations like schools and hospitals typically so much worse managed than private sector manufacturing and retail?nnn3. How firms are differently organized around the world:nnMore recent work has focused on why firms in some countries are very flat with decentralized decision making (US, UK, Canada and Scandinavia) while others are very hierarchical (Southern Europe, China and India). The aim is to use this to illustrate with extensive data and case studies some of the key organizational and cultural differences of firms across countries, and how this helps to explain national performance. For example, firms in developing countries tend to be much smaller in part because owners appear to decentralized decisions to (non-family) managers - why is this and should foreign firms operating in developing countries do the same?nnn4. Improving management practices in developing countries:nnThe final section will focus on recent work run with Accenture and the World Bank, and supported by the Murty family. An extensive project has been working with a large group of medium-sized (250 employee) Indian textile firms to analyze their initial management practices and improve these over time. Extremely detailed performance data has been collected on these firms before, during and after the management intervention. The class will investigate in detail why many of these firms were initially so badly managed, why they struggled to improve their management practices, and what lessons this has for smaller firms in Europe and the US who face many of the same challenges.nnnThe course will be taught by Nick Bloom (Economics Department), who previously worked as business policy adviser in the UK Treasury and as an Associate Consultant at McKinsey. nnnInterested students can look at some of the academic, business and media focused output from the research on: http://www.stanford.edu/~nbloom/, including over 20 articles in the New York Times, Economist, Wall Street Journal, Businessweek, Newsweek, Washington Post and the Financial Times. Lecture notes from the 2009 course (which this year will extend) are posted on online.

This course provides an introduction to the foundations of modern microeconomic theory. Topics include choice theory, with and without uncertainty, consumer and producer theory, dynamic choice and dynamic programming, social choice and efficiency, and fundamentals of general equilibrium.

This course studies the roles of information, incentives and strategic behavior in markets. The rudiments of game theory are developed and applied to selected topics regarding auctions, bargaining, and firms' competitive strategies; information economics; and contracting and market design.

This course intensively studies the theory of auctions and the related literature in bargaining and pricing. Key papers in the early part of the course are Myerson and Satterthwaite on bargaining, Myerson on optimal auctions, and Milgrom and Weber's classic work. We then turn to markets in which complicated preferences and constraints, limitations on the use of cash, or variations in contract details among bidders decisively impair the performance of simple market rules. Emphasis is on Matching markets such as the National Resident Matching Program, asset auctions such as the spectrum auctions. The course also discusses literature on dynamic bargaining, starting with the classic Coase conjecture and reviewing some of the recent developments.

This is the first course in the sequence in graduate econometrics. The course covers basic probability and statistics and, accordingly, is most appropriately viewed as a background course in these topics in preparation for taking up econometrics in 604. Prerequisites are a strong background in undergraduate calculus, linear algebra and probability and statistics. Topics covered in the course include random variables, distribution functions, functions of random variables, expectations, conditional probabilities and Bayes' law, convergence and limit laws, hypothesis testing, confidence intervals, linear regression and maximum likelihood estimation.

This course is exclusively for PhD students at the GSB. This course presents a comprehensive treatment of econometric methods for linear models. Among the topics covered are: the classical linear regression analysis, linear simultaneous equations systems, panel data models, generalized method of moments. This course assumes working knowledge of undergraduate econometrics basic linear algebra, basic probability theory, and statistics that are covered in MGTECON 603. Those who did not take MGTECON 603 or ECON 270 (by Hansen and Hong in the economics department) should see the instructor.

This course will be a first quarter PhD course in microeconomic theory, aimed at PhD students who do not plan to become professional economists. Relative to a course geared to economics PhDs the class will differ in two important ways. First, there will be almost no emphasis on proofs. Second, the topics covered will be broader than the standard set covered in say Econ 202.

Students and faculty review and present recent research papers on basic theories and economic applications of decision theory, game theory and mechanism design. Applications include market design and analyses of incentives and strategic behavior in markets, and selected topics such as auctions, bargaining, contracting, and computation.

The primary objective of this course is to prepare students to evaluate and produce research in empirical microeconomics. The emphasis will be on the overall process of conducting such research: from defining a clear research question, to collecting suitable data, to selecting and executing an appropriate mode of econometric analysis. Students will be expected to read and discuss papers covering a variety of applied topics. Methodological issues will be discussed in depth wherever they arise, and especially where they are central to understanding a paper's implications, but methodology will not be the central focus of the course.nnnSome of the topics to be covered in the course include: nonlinear pricing in imperfectly competitive markets; innovation and the diffusion of innovations; the economics of advertising; consumer information and product-market outcomes. Other topics will be selected based partly on student input.

This course covers various topics in macroeconomics and is designed to expose students to classic papers in the field as well as the latest research at the frontier. Both theoretical and empirical contributions will be discussed. The specific issues covered may include long-run economic growth, economic fluctuations, monetary economics, and macroeconomic policymaking.

The goal of this course is to introduce students to current research topics and open issues related to the design and organization of markets. Topics may include: theoretical and empirical analysis of auctions and matching markets; information aggregation in prediction markets and other mechanisms; microstructure of financial markets; e-commerce and novel marketplaces.

This is an advanced game theory course and requires a basic background in game theory or an advanced applied game theory course. The course covers foundational topics such as type spaces, modeling reasoning and rationality, game forms, solution refinements and more. A collection of additional topics will be covered independently via problem solving assignment in workshop style meetings with student presentations.

Each week, a different economics faculty member will faculty discuss his or her important and /or current research. The course is an important introduction to PhD level research topics and techniques. Students are required to do a three page write-up on each session.

This course is offered for students requiring specialized training in an area not covered by existing courses. To register, a student must obtain permission from the faculty member who is willing to supervise the reading.

This course is elected as soon as a student is ready to begin research for the dissertation, usually shortly after admission to candidacy. To register, a student must obtain permission from the faculty member who is willing to supervise the research.

The objective of this course is to give students an understanding of what international trade policy means for business leaders. To do this, students will have to understand the economic forces that determine the patterns and consequences of international trade. We will analyze trade policy tools used by governments (e.g., tariffs, subsidies and quotas), and examine the role of industry and politics at the domestic and global level in applying these tools. This course will combine lecture, case studies and group interaction.

This course completes the first-year sequence in econometrics. The course initially develops the theoretical and practical aspects of maximum likelihood, quasi-maximum likelihood, GMM and non-linear estimators in greater detail. The instructor will then discuss how these methods are used in practice. Time permitting, we will briefly consider more advanced topics and applications, including: time series methods, nonparametric estimators and simulation estimators.

The goal of this course is to teach students how to use the tools of open economy macroeconomics to connect to the burgeoning literature on institutions in a way that helps them to frame interesting research questions in the area of stabilization, reform, and growth in developing countries.nnnThe growth rate of total factor productivity (TFP) plays an essential role in economic growth. In turn, two principal forces drive TFP growth: (1) changes in ideas (i.e. technological change) and (2) changes in institutions. This course will employ the tools of open economy macroeconomics to study the second of these two forces. Recent contributions in the literature focus on the impact of cross-country differences in initial institutions on long-run growth and development. Prominent examples of such institutional differences include the nature of the legal origins and property rights bequeathed to a country by its colonial masters.nnnThis is a PhD course in economics, but it is open to students from any discipline (i.e. Political Science, History, International Relations) who are willing to make the analytical investment that is necessary to understand and debate the issues in a logical, coherent, and systematic fashion.

This seminar will examine applications of labor economics to business issues and firms' practices. Material will include both theoretical and empirical work, and the syllabus will range from classics in Personnel Economics to current (unpublished) research. Some of the topics to be covered include, but are not limited to, compensation practices, assignment of decision rights, organizational structure, attracting, retaining, and displacing employees, and workplace practices (such as team-based organization, profit sharing, etc.)