Subject description

Corporate Finance explores the key financial decisions managers make to create and sustain value for shareholders. The course introduces the core principles of investment, financing, and payout policy, and examines how these decisions interact to shape a firm’s performance and long-term value. Emphasis is placed on both technical skills and managerial judgment, with a strong link to today’s business environment where financial choices are influenced by global markets, governance standards, and sustainability considerations.

The course is structured around four interconnected modules:

Module I – The Investment Decision We begin with the fundamental question of whether particular capital investments are worthwhile. You will learn tools to evaluate projects and assess profitability, while also considering the impact of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) factors in investment decisions. Module II – The Financing Decision This module examines the financing choices available to firms and how they affect capital structure. We will discuss how companies determine their optimal mix of debt and equity, and explore the growing field of sustainable finance and its role in mobilizing funds for climate action and green investments. Module III – Business Valuation Here we focus on how to value a business using both discounted cash flow methods and relative valuation techniques. We also highlight how valuation underpins securities analysis, portfolio management, M&A, and corporate decision-making. Module IV – The Dividend Decision Finally, we analyze how firms decide on payout policies, balancing dividends and share repurchases. We will also explore corporate governance and ESG as the intersection of profits and principles, emphasizing how distribution decisions reflect broader business responsibilities.

Learning objectives

By the end of the course, students will be able to:

Evaluate investment opportunities by estimating cash flows and applying standard decision criteria. Understand how financing decisions—including capital structure, cost of capital, and payout policy—shape firm value. Perform company valuations using commonly applied approaches in corporate finance. Develop financial forecasts to anticipate business funding needs and cash flow dynamics. Incorporate broader perspectives, recognizing the role of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) factors in financial decision-making.

Subject description

In corporate settings, managerial decision-making cannot rely on intuition alone. As there are often vast amounts of data sources available, we need to effectively communicate the structure of our reasoning, defend it to adversarial challenge and efficiently present information to key stakeholders. As a manager, it is also important to make sense out of uncertain business situations, in which there is incomplete information, as well as be able to evaluate the preferences of experts and colleagues and use state-of-the-art business software to provide analytical support to our reasoning.

Learning objectives

Structure complex decision problems × Make decisions under uncertainty. × Recognise where business analysis can add value. × Understand risk attitudes and use simulation models to analyse the risks and benefits of investment projects. × Use a number of different mathematical modelling approaches to allocate resources. × Create and evaluate simple forecasting models. × This course will allow you to become more familiar with data related decisions and enable you therefore to take more corporate related responsible decisions. ×

The main objective of this course is to equip students with the analytical skill set to use quantitative models which will aid decision-makers in a wide variety of public and private sector settings. Students will learn how to critically assess the potential benefits as well as limitations of using decision models. The emphasis is not on the technicalities underlying of the models, but on the qualitative insights that come from using models to aid managerial thinking and decision making.

The course is multi-disciplinary in nature and links to a number of other areas, including finance, operations management, marketing and accounting, through the choice of cases, thus adding an analytical dimension to the teaching of these areas.

By the end of this course you will be equipped with specific skills in the areas of data analysis, structuring decisions, building decision models, risk assessment, and decision making under uncertainty, recognizing areas where business analysis can add value, selecting appropriate types of analyses and applying them in a small-scale, quick-turnaround fashion.

Subject description

1 Before entering this MBA program, many of you have been individual contributors in your organizations. That is, your main responsabilities included performing specific tasks in your áreas of technical expertise (i.e., sales, finance, marketing, etc). Your main contribution to your company was primarily based on your knowledge, experience and actions. However, when you complete your MBA program, it is likely that you will be given some management position that will involve leading a team and/or formally managing a department. This course is designed to address those fundamental aspects of managing and leading people. We will focus on those areas of human behavior, at the individual, group and organizational level, which are important determinants of people’s lives in the workplace. In particular, the differentsessions will provide you with a number of critical concepts and competencies on key issues such as self and career management, motivation, leadership, managing people, and change management.

Learning objectives

(1) Increase participants’ sensitivity towards the potential impact of human issues in the workplace. (2) Understand the importance of developing key leadership competencies in the corporation, like setting directions, inspire action, align resources, motivate, persuade and influence people and manage interpersonal conflicts. Improve participants´ understanding of change, leadership and teams within an uncertain and complex organizational context. (3) Evaluate the future of work. Improve participants understanding of change, leadership, and teams within an ever more uncertain and complex organizational context. (4) Transfer to students a strong sense of corporate social responsibility (CSR) for the outcome of their decisions regarding people management. (5) Evaluate the impact of work and management practices on sustainability through employee outcomes. (6) Adopt a best practice approach to mitigate issues related to discrimination, unfairness, and to foster employee well-being in the workplace.

Subject description

This subject will help students get an insight into the importance of the management accounting systems for making decisions, planning and later control in any organization.

2 A cost and management accounting system collects and classifies costs and assigns them to cost objects. The goal of a cost accounting system is to measure the cost of designing, developing, producing (or purchasing), selling, distributing, and servicing particular products or services. Cost allocation is at the heart of most accounting systems. Cost behavior – how the activities of an organization affect its costs – is also fundamental to cost accounting systems. The data provided by a cost accounting system is used for various purposes, which include product costing, planning and control, and decision making. This course aims to give you a critical overview of management accounting systems as practices by which organizations plan and control their activities in societies, and the profits generated through these activities. You will learn the core cost and management accounting concepts and methods.

Learning objectives

- - - - - - - - - - - -

The purpose of this course is to introduce students to the types of managerial information used to effectively and efficiently run the business. The emphasis is on understanding the kind of information to ask for in various decision settings and how to use it (the managerial function) as opposed to the technical details of how to produce the data (the accounting function). Of course, some technical expertise is needed to understand the strengths and limitations of the data. However, the course focuses on the use of that data as information in managerial decision making; that is, interpretation and evaluation in different organizational settings. Any organisation’s long-term competitive success is critically dependent on (a) the quality of information about its products, services, organisational units, customers, and processes, (b) its ability to act on that information, and (c) its ability to control its performance consistent with that information. This course is designed to provide an understanding of how accounting is used within organisations. It will cover technical issues in management accounting, and wider issues concerning the role of accounting in shaping management structures and decisions, in both manufacturing and service contexts. The course therefore aims to develop both a technical and a critical grasp of management accounting in its strengths and limitations.

The key learning objectives of the course focus on the following topics:

• 1. Appraise cost accounting systems in their organizational settings.
• 2. Evaluate how cost accounting can help you to make decisions in organizations.
• 3. Examine the fundamental cost categories and the building blocks of costing systems.
• 34. Apply and compare job costing and product costing systems.
• 5. Evaluate the roles of cost allocation in organizations.
• 6. Debate the significance of activity-based-costing (ABC) and assess how to implement and use ABC.
• 7. Identify and describe the main features of the management control environment.
• 8. Design and implement performance measurement systems, using concepts as strategic maps and performance indicators.
• 9. Highligh the importance of management accounting systems to properly measure sustainability.
• Successfully meeting these learning objectives entails developing your abilities to think independently and work collaboratively.
• The course emphasizes team building and communication skills, critical thinking and decision-making skills, emphasizing real-world examples.

Subject description

Managerial Economics provides students with a framework to understand the main economic variables that affect business activity. Understanding the microeconomy is the first stepping-stone toward achieving a full grasp of the economic world that surrounds us. Most of the world ́s countries rely on free markets to make most of their economic decisions, and those markets automatically answer the key economic questions (What will we produce? How will we produce it? At what price? Who will get it?) through the autonomous operation of supply and demand. The course will review the basic concepts of supply, demand, elasticity, market failures and externalities to provide a broad perspective on how free markets work. The objective is to give students a firm understanding of how supply and demand at the micro-level determine the basic parameters of doing business. Yet markets are not perfect. In our times, a period of deregulation and strong faith in markets to solve economic problems was followed by the two deepest economic crises since the early 20thcentury, with devastating effects on output, income and employment nearly everywhere. This experience brought back to the fore the key questions of how economic decisions should be made,and how much governments should intervene in the presence of deep recessions and market failures, especially in light of pressing problems such as environmental deterioration or rising inequality, which the market appears poorly equipped to solve.

The second part of the course will focus on the macroeconomy and the policies that governments follow, and how the interaction between free economic forces and policy affect the business cycle and company prospects, especially in the wake of a classic "black swan" event, the global pandemic that disrupted our economic systems and sent us into the deepest recession in a century. It will begin by analyzing the key macroeconomic indicators --GDP, inflation and unemployment and the business cycle--, and evaluate how changes in these variables affect businesses. It will then outline the operation of fiscal and monetary policy and explore how and why policy decisions are made, to give students the tools to anticipate key policy decisions and understand their impact onthe macroeconomy. Recent policy decisions around the world will be analyzed.

Finally, the course moves to the global level, for a look at international trade, exchange rates and the balance of payments. It will detail the forces of trade, the determinants of exchange rates, and the important concepts underlying the balance of payments; and how all of those elements of the international economy affect business. In the process, we will encounter an explanation for the financial crisis and successive crises, will understand different countries ́ growth strategies and their limits, and will be able to understand how the intense process of globalization that the world has experienced will change our economic futures.

Economics is of crucial importance for business activities. On the one hand, the structure of the market in which the firm operates and the conditions of demand and supply it faces decisively affect its profitability. On the other hand, overall trends of economic growth and international trade and the policies that governments implement have an impact on any business activity. Business people need to understand the logic behind economic processes in their own markets and on a general level in order to anticipate the policies that governments are most likely to apply, and adjust their behavior accordingly.

Learning objectives

Students will learn about the social and environmental impact of government economic policies and of businesses interactions with their stakeholders. As part of this learning, they will be able to evaluate which of those policies and business × practices lead to a more sustainable and equitable type of economic growth. The course will cover the most important economic theories and concepts that relate to the macroeconomic and microeconomic environment of businesses. At the end of the course studentswill comprehend these concepts and tools of economic analysis, will have a more formal vision of why and how different economic policies, such as labor, fiscal, monetary or trade policies, operate and will assess the implications of different economic contexts and policies on the welfare × of individuals, firms and the government.

Subject description

This course in Supply Chain Management (SCM) provides a comprehensive understanding of the strategies, tools, and challenges that drive effective supply chains in both local and global contexts. Students will explore key concepts such as strategic fit, supply chain coordination, reverse logistics, and sourcing strategies while gaining insights from real-world business cases and simulations. The course will also focus on emerging trends in technology, globalization, and the evolving role of China in global supply chains.

Throughout the course, students will engage with hands-on simulations and practical case studies from leading companies to understand how supply chain decisions directly impact a firm’s performance. Special attention will be given to managing uncertainties in supply chains, achieving flexibility, and designing sustainable, competitive supply chains. The sessions will culminate in a keynote speaker presentation from an industry leader and a final group project where students apply their learning to real-world challenges.

By the end of this course, students will have acquired critical tools and frameworks to manage both operational and strategic aspects of supply chains, preparing them for leadership roles in an increasingly interconnected global economy.

Learning objectives

Supply Chain Management (SCM) is the business function that deals with the production and flow of information and material within and across organizations. It covers different areas such as controlling inventory, finding the most efficient transportation solution, determining an effective sourcing strategy, applying Lean concepts to Supply Chain, and Sustainability, among others.

This course will help students understand various aspects of a Supply Chain. It will demonstrate how successful companies run their Supply Chain, the risks inherent in an SCM, and the competitive edge that an innovative SCM can provide. A well- managed Supply Chain will not only help a firm produce more effectively, but it can also provide a sustainable competitive edge. This course will also introduce various frameworks and tools to help future professionals make better decisions related to supply chain management.