Year 2: Course Descriptions

Advanced Negotiations follows the first-year “Core Negotiations” course, both of which help students better negotiate with investors, clients, bosses, and perhaps most formidable of all, friends and family. Through practice cases, students will obtain a set of tools (e.g., how to discover and execute efficient trade-offs) to improve the ways in which they create and claim value.  

This course examines the ethical dimensions of business. Questions addressed include “In whose interests should firms be managed?”, “What rules guide firms’ engagement with customers?”, and “Should firms try to solve social problems?” We will discover the tools  for reasoning about right and wrong through discussion and debate about the readings.

Competitive Strategy develops a broad approach for evaluating the prospects for firm profits. It looks at many firms across a broad range of markets. The course spends time on managerial and behavioral issues and/or institutional details, and derives the applied principles mainly from microeconomic theory. 

Using both lectures and cases, the class provides a framework for applying corporate financial theory to applications that involve capital budgeting, valuation, capital structure, raising capital, mergers, and financial restructuring. The course focus then shifts to outside of the corporation to explore issues related to corporate governance and compensation.

Managerial Controls focuses on the use of internal accounting information for planning, controlling, and evaluating firms' operational decisions and personnel. The course integrates accounting with ideas from microeconomics, data analysis, decision analysis, finance, operations management, and organizational behavior.

This course is designed for students committed to actively and intentionally engaging in leadership development. The goal is to increase students' capacity to lead others through the practical, hands-on application of leadership concepts both inside and outside of the classroom. 

This course develops the foundations of competitive strategy through a rigorous analytical lens, using economic models to understand how firms gain and sustain advantage in dynamic markets. We explore how tools from game theory and industrial organization can be used to evaluate pricing, product positioning, bundling, auctions, and entry strategies.

Designing and Leading Organizations surveys the major forms in which organizations are designed. Besides analyzing the classic forms of organization design, this course puts an emphasis on novel opportunities and challenges that have emerged due to recent processes such as globalization, network economies, the Internet, big data, or crowdsourcing. 

The aim is to improve decision making by considering relevant concepts and rules from two areas: taxation and financial reporting. The first half  focuses on firms' operations from the perspective of taxes and business strategy. This part is designed to give you the tools to identify, understand, and evaluate tax issues related to firm operations and tax planning opportunities. The second half focuses on financial reporting. The emphasis is less on rules, more on concepts and building a framework.  

This course enhances the legal competency of EMBA students through a survey of critical legal and regulatory issues affecting organizations. The course sharpens legal instincts and provides students with knowledge and skills that enable them to ascertain and avoid legal risks, identify competitive opportunities, and contribute to long-term organizational performance. 

This course benefits you if you expect a post-Yale career path that involves one of the following: (i) contribute directly to strategic pricing decisions in an organization, (ii) advise companies on pricing strategy; (iii) work in strategic functions that need close coordination with pricing teams. We combine the modern theories of pricing strategy with numerous examples from how today’s businesses in the U.S. and abroad conduct pricing.

This course analyzes the economics of innovation and the effects of artificial intelligence on different industries. Topics include economics of price discrimination, searching costs, the intellectual property (IP) protection system; patent races; licensing and litigation; networks and standards. It also focuses on the characteristics of sharing economy (Uber, Airbnb, etc.), as well as the effect of AI on journalism, online advertising, retail, and other industries.

This course is designed to introduce students to the challenges and pitfalls of financing new enterprises and covers the full life cycle of entrepreneurial investing, from identifying opportunities and refining the business plan, to marshaling resources to take advantage of these opportunities and executing the business plan, through harvesting the venture's success.

This course discusses how Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) information can be incorporated into investment portfolios. ESG objectives are important for investors representing trillions of dollars and may affect their portfolios’ risk and return. Students consider ways investors can articulate their financial and non-financial portfolio goals, as well as the potential for ESG-minded asset owners to impact the companies they invest in.

This course delves into the rich set of interactions between financial markets, business cycles, and macroeconomic policy. It develops a framework to understand how asset prices and other shocks drive business cycles, and how central banks set interest rates to stabilize cycles and inflation.

The course deals with questions such as: What is the global financial system and how does it work? What are the pressures on that system including market, regulatory, political, and social dynamics? What are the key challenges to that system? How can the system be strengthened?

This course studies a succession of asset classes using current academic and practitioner research. Students will study portfolios in the spirit of the Yale Model and address the range of institutional issues raised by the use of illiquid, new, or sophisticated investments.

The course provides a broad overview of quantitative investment management, focusing on the application of finance theory to the issues faced by portfolio managers and investors in general. Topics include asset allocation, asset pricing models such as the capital asset pricing model and arbitrage pricing theory, performance evaluation, and an introduction to the use of derivatives for risk hedging.

This course focuses on the most critical components and issues in global health in the era of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), particularly in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), and cost-effective innovative solutions.

This course provides an introduction to the economics of healthcare markets with a focus on understanding inefficiencies, opportunities for reforms and innovations, and how strategic interactions among firms impact profits, health outcomes, and social welfare. Topics covered include: measuring the value of health and medical care; the role of health insurance and competition among insurers; assessing healthcare delivery facilities such as hospitals, nursing homes, and retail clinics; whether pharmaceutical prices are too high and whether we should purchase pharmaceuticals from other counties; lessons from behavioral economics about the role of imperfectly informed consumers; and the impact of the Affordable Care Act on health care in the U.S.

The healthcare delivery system is made up of many organizations from large hospitals to small private practices. The operations of these organizations are complex as they involve many highly trained professionals with a wide range of specializations, sophisticated and expensive technology, and customers (patients) with diverse needs all in an environment that is increasingly cost-sensitive. In this course, we study the concepts and tools that can increase the efficiency and quality of the healthcare delivery process. We will explore questions of capacity planning, scheduling, and process design in healthcare.

This course surveys demand-side and supply-side factors that influence the delivery of healthcare and health in the U.S. The course inherently challenges the student to consider the appropriate role of government in the U.S. healthcare delivery system.

Population health and health equity frameworks share the recognition that unmet health-related social needs, such as food and/or housing insecurity, may increase the risk of developing chronic conditions and reduce an individual’s ability to manage those conditions. Population health, in turn, has a focus on reducing avoidable healthcare utilization and increased healthcare costs that are often the resulting reality. The focus of health equity, a long-standing framework anchored in social justice, is on the equal distribution of good health with a specific emphasis on groups that are stigmatized, marginalized, and disadvantaged as a result of historical and contemporary policies across domains that systematically affect access to opportunity.

This course provides an in-depth exploration of venture capital investing in the healthcare sector. Through didactic sessions led by venture capitalists coupled with case studies, students will learn the fundamentals of investing in early-stage private companies across multiple healthcare subsectors (e.g., biotech/life sciences, healthcare IT, healthcare services). Key investing topics covered in the course include: industry structure, investment thesis generation, due diligence, risk/return assessment, valuation, M&A and IPO exits, impact investing, and stakeholder management.

This course explores legal and policy developments pertaining to climate change with an overarching aim of anticipating how the climate change problem will affect our laws, our organizations, and our lives in the long run.

This course equips students with the skills needed to navigate the emerging role of an ESG Controller, a key position responding to the growing regulatory focus on ESG disclosures. Through case studies and practical applications, students gain insight into the real-world identification and management of ESG risks and the broader implications of sustainability targets, preparing them to play a pivotal role in shaping the future of business in an increasingly ESG-conscious world.

This course discusses how Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) information can be incorporated into investment portfolios. ESG objectives are important for investors representing trillions of dollars and may affect their portfolios’ risk and return. Students consider ways investors can articulate their financial and non-financial portfolio goals, as well as the potential for ESG-minded asset owners to impact the companies they invest in.

Corporate Sustainability Strategy focuses on the logic for making the environment and sustainability a core element of corporate management and strategy. Analyze how and when environmental, energy, and other sustainability issues can be translated into business model innovation and competitive advantage. 

In this course, students will immerse themselves in a comprehensive study of sustainable investing principles, methodologies, and their practical applications across a spectrum of investment vehicles including private equity, venture capital, real assets, among other alternative instruments.

This course is designed to establish a common understanding of sustainability and business and introduces a broad set of tools, frameworks, standards, and guidelines that are in practice today. The course explores details of sustainability strategy implementation and is designed to link sustainability to overall business drivers.