Business Administration PhD Courses

Description: This course develops students’ understanding of the core themes in financial reporting and disclosure research. It adopts a broad user perspective with a focus on capital markets participants. Changes in financial reporting standards and regulations are transversal themes throughout the course. The course exposes students to a diversity of theoretical paradigms and methodological tools. It allows students to synthesize and analyze research on fundamental questions about financial reporting and disclosure so that they can identify and evaluate new research questions.

Component(s): Seminar

Description: The performance of an organization ultimately rests on the effectiveness of its management control systems, which ensure a successful implementation of an organization’s strategy and risks assessment. Accordingly, this course provides a comprehensive review of foundational and current research in management control, offers an overview of the various theories used to investigate research questions focusing on management control and risk management, and presents and discusses the key methodologies adopted by researchers in the area. By the end of the seminar, participants have a comprehensive understanding of the multi-dimensional nature of research in the areas of management control and risk management.

Component(s): Seminar

Description: In this course, students are exposed to research on emerging topics within accounting. Students explore these topics using various theoretical paradigms and methodological approaches, which jointly offer an understanding of the diversity of accounting research. By emphasizing cutting-edge topics and research methods, this course adopts a forward-looking stance with respect to accounting research so that students can better identify relevant and promising research themes.

Component(s): Seminar

Description: In this course, students develop a foundation for reading, evaluating, and producing scholarly research in the domain of auditing and assurance. It provides a comprehensive review of foundational and current research in auditing, an overview of the various theories used to investigate research questions focusing on auditing, and presents and discusses the key methodologies adopted by researchers in the area. By the end of the seminar, participants have a comprehensive understanding of the multi-dimensional nature of research in the areas of auditing and are able to develop a viable research proposal on a related topic.

Component(s): Seminar

Description:

The course reviews several topics in corporate finance and closely related topics that are increasingly incorporated into corporate finance research. It focuses primarily on managers of real and, to lesser extent, financial assets. As such, the course deals with the recent work on the four aspects of the firm’s budget equation (profitability, external financing, optimal investment and payouts); capital structure; firm focus and diversification; corporate governance, social responsibility and compensation; and the effect on other firm stakeholders and of exogenous shocks.

Component(s): Seminar

Description: This course provides an advanced coverage of the general theory of derivatives pricing, and an examination of special topics on option pricing and financial engineering. It covers and contrasts basic models in option pricing by two different paradigms, absence of arbitrage and absence of stochastic dominance in terms of their theoretical contributions and empirical implications. It then proceeds to cases, where the basic model fails because of violations of its fundamental assumptions of market completeness and frictionless trading. Frictionless derivatives pricing models in the presence of market incompleteness include stochastic volatility, GARCH and jump processes. The attempts to deal with the presence of market frictions such as transaction costs are also briefly covered.

Component(s): Seminar

Description: This course focuses on theoretical and empirical tools and results in asset pricing and portfolio choice. The course introduces continuous time finance and broadly covers cross-sectional and time-series models in asset pricing, consumption-based models, as well as intermediary asset pricing including the role of capital constraints. Topics covered include utility and risk aversion, portfolio choice, stochastic discount factors, equilibrium and efficiency, mean-variance analysis and spanning tests, factor models, heterogeneous beliefs, learning, rational expectations equilibria, information/strategic trading/liquidity, and tests of asset pricing models and anomalies.

Component(s): Seminar

Description: The course presents approaches used in conducting research in finance and accounting. A discussion of general problems in research is followed by a review of relevant statistical concepts, general problems of financial model building, and the linear regression model. The problems of unit roots, time series approaches for testing the stability of financial variables, and co-integration are also discussed. The issue of stochastic volatility is also considered as are other techniques such as qualitative choice methods, regime switching models, market-timing tests for performance appraisal, instrumental variables simultaneous equation estimation, generalized method of moments (GMM), quantile regression, regression discontinuities, as well as bootstrapping and Monte Carlo estimation.

Component(s): Seminar

Description: This course provides students with a broad overview of the field of Organizational Behaviour (OB). It aims to help students acquire deep knowledge about diverse topics in OB by familiarizing them with foundational concepts and theories, emerging theoretical perspectives, and current empirical findings. Throughout the course, students will develop an original research idea with the goal of advancing knowledge on a specific topic in the field OB. The course format is designed to expose students to different scholarly perspectives on OB issues.

Component(s): Seminar

Description: This course is designed to provide students with an overview of traditional and advanced methods used in the field of management. It aims to help students acquire knowledge of diverse methods, understand the relationship between theory and method, and learn how to make appropriate choices in their research. Traditional methods such as grounded theory, case study research, common regression models for diverse dependent variables, and panel data analysis are covered, as well as a selection of more advanced techniques. Throughout the course, students are exposed to different methodological approaches (both qualitative and quantitative) and will work on their own research projects.

Component(s): Seminar

Description: This course examines and contrasts debates within Strategic Management. Readings are included from both established and emerging debates, engaging in both retrospective and forward views of strategy. Debates include divergent interpretations of scientific groundings of strategic management, foundations of strategic management, history of strategic management, resource theories, theories of competition, theories of top management team leadership and theories of the organization-external environment interface.

Component(s): Seminar

Description: This course provides students with knowledge of foundational and advanced topics related to the design of quantitative studies in management. It aims to help students acquire the skills to evaluate quantitative research and design rigorous quantitative studies. Major themes include: latent constructs and their measurement, reliability and validity in measurement, quantitative study designs, types of relations among variables, statistical significance, power, effect size, and meta-analysis. Throughout the course, students will critique published studies and learn about methodological choices they will face in their own research.

Component(s): Seminar

Description: This course offers a review of relevant managerial marketing issues and their repercussions on society and stakeholders. Students will learn how to develop an innovative approach to view complex business and societal problems into potential research programs considering ethical and societal welfare and understanding the complexities of business/organizational contexts. Topics covered in this course may vary.

Component(s): Seminar

Description: Understanding human behaviour is at the heart of the marketing function. This course examines behavioural approaches in understanding marketing phenomena rooted in several cognate disciplines (e.g., psychology, sociology, anthropology, biology, economics, neuroscience). Students will learn how to develop research programs within the broad field of behavioural marketing across many real-world contexts (e.g., consumer behaviour, advertising, branding, retailing). Topics covered in this course may vary.

Component(s): Seminar

Description: This course examines a broad range of data collection procedures and data analytic approaches used in marketing research and introduces students to the basics of empirical research, with an emphasis on survey and experimental approaches. It familiarizes students with the core assumptions underlying methodological approaches and the inferential value of different data and analytical results and allows students to develop skills to match research questions with appropriate methodological approaches. Students will have hands-on experience with data analysis software. The course also exposes students to key tenets of research ethics and integrity relevant to each approach. Topics covered in this course may vary.

Component(s): Seminar

Description: The course offers a review of quantitative models and qualitative research methods relevant to marketing research in various substantive domains. This course familiarizes students with the application and interpretation of quantitative empirical models and emphasizes their use in and implications for theory testing and managerial practice. It also introduces students to qualitative research methods and highlights their use in theory development. Topics covered in this course may vary.

Component(s): Seminar

Description: This research seminar is offered in three modules. The conceptual aspects of digital innovation, digitalization, and digital transformation are covered in Module I. Module II focuses on digital entrepreneurship and innovation. Individual and societal impacts of digital technologies and innovation are discussed in Module III. The main goals of this seminar are to: i) understand the research and managerial issues related to digital innovation, digital entrepreneurship, and individual and societal impacts of new technologies and innovations, ii) review the underlying theories in different disciplines such as management information systems, strategic management, entrepreneurship, and marketing, and iii) synthesize academic articles in order to identify major research and management themes within and across topics. The integrative coverage of topics provides students in various disciplines such as management information systems, management, marketing, and finance with the necessary knowledge to conduct conceptual and empirical research on interdisciplinary topics in digital innovation.

Component(s): Seminar

Description: The course provides an overview of how diffusion and adoption of emerging hard and soft technologies shape modern supply chain management. Adoption of these technologies results in a shift from the traditional linear and sequential supply chain operations towards interconnected, open system supply networks. How these advances impact the tenets of modern supply chain management are discussed in terms of operations planning, risk management, sourcing, and logistics, among others. Hybrid learning mediums involving lectures, research article presentations, cases, games and/or guest lecturers are used for course delivery.

Component(s): Seminar

Description: Special topics in supply chain management, business technology management and/or business analytics are covered. The specific course description is made available prior to the registration period.

Component(s): Seminar

Description: Students in this course explore big data, artificial intelligence concepts and algorithms with a major focus on business applications. Among others, the topics covered are search methods, knowledge representation and reasoning, decision making under uncertainty, and machine learning. Through hands-on projects in different functional areas of business, students are exposed to genetic algorithms, particle swarm optimization, artificial neural networks, ensemble learning, and deep learning including performance evaluation, error reduction and empirical validation. For a managerial problem identified, students conduct a review of relevant literature and implement an intelligent system using specialized software.

Component(s): Seminar