Courses
Core courses in the first year provide a strong foundation across business disciplines while second year electives allow you to customize your MBA
Core Courses
| Accounting | Management |
| Business Ethics/Law | Marketing |
| Finance | Strategy |
| Economics | International Residency |
| Statistics |
Elective Courses
Please note: this list is a sample and does not include all electives offered. The actual electives offered vary from year to year.
Core Course Descriptions
Accounting
Financial Accounting & Reporting
Accounting reports are an important means of communication with investors. This course focuses on the development, analysis and use of these reports. It provides an understanding of what these reports contain, what assumptions and concepts accountants use to prepare them, and why they use those assumptions and concepts. The course uses examples to provide students with a clear understanding of accounting concepts. It stresses the ability to apply these concepts to real world cases, which by their nature are complex and ambiguous. In addition to text-oriented materials, the classes also include cases so that students can discuss applications of basic concepts, actual financial reports, and articles from newspapers. In addition to traditional introductory topics, other topics may include mergers and acquisitions, purchase and pooling, free cash flow and financial statement analysis.Business Ethics/Law
Professional Responsibility
This course is designed to encourage students to think critically about the broader context and consequences of the decisions they will make as managers. To this end, the course first develops the argument that ethical considerations are important in the decision-making process. Second, the course develops analytical reasoning skills that enable the student to identify and weigh competing ethical concerns in the managerial decision-making process. And, lastly, through specific examples and case discussion, the student is made aware of the importance of understanding the interdependence of markets, ethics, and law in a democratic, free market society.Finance
Foundations of Finance
This rigorous quantitative course introduces the structure of markets and the valuation of financial assets-including stocks, bonds, futures, forwards, options, and swaps. Principles of modern portfolio theory are developed to explain the concepts of risk-adjusted returns, beta risk measures, and efficient portfolio selection within a mean-variance framework. Fixed income analytics, including yield-to-maturity, duration, and forward rates, are applied to topics like the analysis of yield curves and bond arbitrage models. Illustrations in the course are drawn from both domestic and international financial markets. Although this is an introductory course, by the end students are expected to understand the underlying analytical framework for modern finance as well as to know how to apply basic valuation formulas to standard financial instruments.Economics
Firms & Markets
This course provides an intensive overview of the economic analysis of firms, industries, and markets. We examine the rationales for decisions by individual buyers and sellers, as well as how these decisions are aggregated through markets. We explore the forms that competition can take, the role of industry structure, and the influences of government policies. The course provides tools and conceptual frameworks that executives can use to better understand and analyze business decision-making, as well as the market and government-policy environment within which businesses operate.Global Economy
This course explores the international macroeconomic and monetary environment within which businesses operate. It provides the concepts, relationships, and frameworks that can be used to better understand the performance of national economies and the interplay among national economies and financial markets. It examines the fundamental determinants of long-term economic growth, linkages among countries through trade, exchange rates, and the balance of payments, business cycles and recessions, inflation and deflation, and the effects of governments’ macroeconomic policies.Statistics
Statistics & Data Analysis
Students learn the use of surveys, probability concepts and statistical methodology necessary for decision making in a business environment. The course, which stresses applications, covers: data collection and analysis; probability and probability distributions; statistical inference, including estimation and sample size determination; and regression and correlation analysis. The course is data based, with great emphasis on statistical inference, including applications to total quality management, polling, employee attitude surveys, market research, operations, and finance.Management
Leadership in Organizations
The first half of this course focuses on the design of organizations and how managers can make organizations more effective. The second half of the course examines how an organization can maximize the performance of its members. Students learn how to analyze individual performance issues in the context of complex organizations and how to manage change processes.
Collaboration, Conflict, & Negotiation
This course explores the management of conflicts that arise from differences in interests such as goals, priorities, or competition for limited resources. It focuses on negotiation as a primary process for settling disputes between individuals and within and between organizations. The course examines and interrelates the key variables in a negotiation, including stakes, power, interdependence, trust, coalitions, communication, the use of time, one’s personal style of negotiation, and the consistency of a settlement with the firm’s business strategy. Simulations are used extensively throughout.
Operations Management
This course serves as an introduction to operations, viewed from the perspective of the general manager, rather than from that of the operations specialist. The coverage is selective; the course concentrates on a small number of themes, from the areas of operations management and information technology, that have emerged as the central building blocks of world-class operations. It also presents a sample of key tools and techniques that have proven useful. The topics covered are equally relevant to the manufacturing and service sectors.Marketing
Marketing
This course provides an overview of marketing, focusing on essential skills needed by successful managers in all business functions. Topics include how individual and organizational consumers make decisions; segmenting markets and estimating customer economic value; positioning the firm's offering; effective marketing research; new product development; pricing strategies; communicating with consumers and estimating advertising's effectiveness; and managing relationships with sales force and intermediary partners. The course emphasizes how marketing combines qualitative and quantitative analysis, also teaching how to work in environments with considerable uncertainty. It uses a combination of lectures and case analysis, involving both individual and group projects.Strategy
Strategy
This course studies two related issues. The first is how to gain an advantage against competitors in the complex and dynamic global marketplace. Core business strategy themes include how to analyze the business environment, assess resources and capabilities, and choose competitive strategies. The second issue is how to create corporate value through configuring and coordinating multi-business activities. Core corporate strategy themes include analyzing scale and scope, evaluating corporate competencies, managing the multi-business corporation, and choosing corporate strategies.International Residency
Global Study Tours
As part of the Executive MBA Program, students participate in two for-credit required Global Study Tours. Recent study tours have taken students to a number of economically emerging regions. This intensive, rigorous program enables students to interact with industry, financial institutions, and government leaders from around the world. Participants conduct study group work regarding the countries involved, generate post-trip individual papers, and actively participate in meetings during the program. In recent years, Executive MBA classes have traveled to Argentina, Brazil, Chile, China, Croatia, India, Korea, Poland, Russia, Slovakia, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, and Vietnam. With each destination, students gain valuable insight into today’s global business environment.Download Core Course Descriptions
Elective Course Descriptions
Advanced Topics in Management Communications
No longer can executives rely on strong technical and analytical skills alone. Leaders must also be able to effectively communicate financial models, analytic results, strategic plans and business forecasts. This course, designed for students who are experienced communicators, will blend theoretical models for effective persuasion with practical application of course material in a simulated financial services setting. Exercises focus on communicating to potential audiences of internal and external colleagues including employees, senior management, clients, and potential business partners. Written and spoken communication assignments range from informative to persuasive in a variety of simulated settings. Situations engage hypothetical audiences that range from receptive to difficult. Students benefit from individual feedback on all written work as well as individual and team coaching based on video recorded reviews of each presentation.
Bankruptcy, Reorganization & Distressed Securities
The practical and theoretical implications of bankruptcy and distressed restructuring are examined in this course. Focus is primarily on corporate form organizations ranging from banks to retail firms to manufacturers. Topics include valuation effects of bankruptcy; workout strategies; the bankruptcy-reorganization process from the viewpoint of different participants; and the implications of bankruptcy for banks, workers, and state and national industrial policy.
Competitive Strategy in the Marketplace
This is a rigorous advanced course in competitive strategy set at the level of the business as it faces competitors at the product market level. It consists of lectures and formal case presentations recommending strategic actions by student teams to counterpart teams representing senior managers responsible for approving their recommendation. Topics covered include both the process and content of strategic action and interaction, strategic models, brands as a source of competitive advantage, methods for comparing competitive offers and strategies, scenario analysis, competitive signaling, and competitive intelligence.
Corporate Finance
This course presents the theory and practice of corporate finance. Topics include concepts of corporate valuation; financial statement analysis and forecasting; the evaluation of capital investments under differing assumptions about risks and the state of the world; the financing choice for capital projects; the effects of debt, equity, and derivative financial instruments on the value of the firm; dividend policy and other stakeholder forms of payment; corporate restructuring, bankruptcy, and merger; and issues in corporate control and compensation.
Crisis Management
This course focuses on the business decisions and management processes necessary to anticipate, plan for, manage through and recover from crises. A key focus is organizational behavior, especially the way companies in distress predictably behave: the predictable missteps many executives make when things go wrong, and ways to prevent predictable but counterproductive behavior.
Debt Instruments and Markets
This course covers the valuation of fixed income securities and investment strategies utilizing them. Topics include the mathematics of bond valuation, immunization, treasury markets and instruments, different kinds of debt instruments, like mortgage-backed securities, swaps, interest-rate futures, credit derivatives etc. Hedging strategies and other uses of these securities are covered.
Entrepreneurial Transactions
Whatever your relationship to a new venture, your chance of success is far better if you understand how to handle the transactions and relationships that shape it. That’s because creating a new firm means negotiating many different contracts into existence. The goals of this course are to develop your ability to craft wise agreements at every stage of a new venture’s life, and deal wisely with a new venture’s investors, founders, suppliers, advisors, employees and others. By the end of the course, students will learn how to manage the legal, financial and negotiating challenges of important entrepreneurial transactions.
Foundations of Entrepreneurship
This course seeks to explore the many dimensions of new venture creation and growth and to foster innovation and new business formation in independent and corporate settings. The course will integrate both an academic and practitioner view of the challenges facing entrepreneurs and investors involved in entrepreneurial, venture capital and private equity investment activities. The course draws on a variety of disciplines including management and finance, to develop frameworks and techniques that are needed to plan, start, evaluate and successfully operate ventures.
Implementing Strategy
Implementing Strategy focuses on designing better organizational structures to ensure effective strategy implementation. This course examines the following questions: Given a strategy, how do we get execution right? What could go wrong? How do we correct it through better design of structure? Through analyses of several case studies, students probe how strategies are actually executed through the medium of structure. The course also examines how organizational dimensions such as strategy, structure, technology and culture, and the many sub-dimensions within each of these, relate to one another and how they collectively determine the overall adaptive efficiency of the organization with respect to its operating environment.
Information Analysis for Managerial Decision Making
This course complements courses addressing operational management, marketing and strategy. Cost management plays a key-supporting role in the creation of more value to the consumer of a firm's products and services, thus enhancing its competitiveness. Any organization can benefit from cost management systems that accurately provide information and facilitate integration of initiatives such as total quality; new product and service design; cost reduction; and business process improvement that enhance their competitiveness and profitability.
Investment Banking
This course provides a broad overview of investment banking and the forces that are continuing to change it worldwide. It examines each of the principal businesses in which the major investment banks are involved including raising capital; advising on mergers and acquisitions; serving as a broker/dealer; trading and investing the bank’s own capital; and managing the assets of others. Along the way, we will ask which of these activities fit well within a bank’s overall portfolio of businesses, and which ones might not. We examine how different investment banks are pursuing different models in terms of the relative emphasis that they place on these various activities. We also see how a bank might draw on a combination of these activities in providing solutions to client problems, and students analyze some of the potential conflicts that could arise in the process.
Leadership
This course is meant for those who wish to understand and further develop their innate potential and propensity to lead others. If you wish to be CEO of a large organization someday, plan to be an entrepreneur and make your mark, or want to do good for society after doing well in your career and start your own philanthropy, you will need multiple and often conflicting constituencies on board to follow your vision. But if you don’t lead, others will not follow. This course will help you hone some of the essential self-reflective skills you need to realize such career objectives. This course will also be valuable to those who wish to have a broad intellectual understanding of the context of leading and the content of leadership.
Managerial Decision Making
This course takes a systematic approach to improve your decision-making skills in a way similar to the ways good doctors help people become healthier. Many people are familiar with what is needed to lead a healthy life but do not follow the course of action they know is the right one. Similarly, many managers know what is needed in order to make good decisions but often do not follow this course of action. This course will focus on the ways that decision making departs from the desired way and will help you overcome the difficulties of reaching it. The course is organized around a major distinction in decision-making between descriptive, normative and prescriptive aspects.
Managing Change
Contemporary business environments contain challenges that demand an increasing pace, volume and complexity of organizational changes. Most organizations, whether they are entrepreneurial start-ups or long-established Fortune 500 firms, find that they must change or wither. This course is geared toward deepening students' understanding of the challenges, techniques and burdens associated with initiating and implementing major changes in an organization. The objective is to prepare managers, or their consultants and advisers, to meet the challenges of organizational change successfully. As such, the course is especially useful for students who plan careers in management consulting, general management (whether in line or staff positions) and entrepreneurship or corporate venturing.
Managing the Growing Company
This course seeks to provide an understanding of the knowledge and skills that are required to manage and grow small-to mid-sized firms. Students study the typical problems and opportunities that confront such organizations and use a variety of disciplines including management, strategy and entrepreneurial finance in order to formulate courses of action based on incomplete information.
Managing High-Performing Teams
We all work in teams, and yet very few of us know how to make teams effective. Furthermore, while the majority of organizations employ cross-functional teams, only limited training is provided to team leaders that are held accountable for their teams’ performance. This course is aimed at improving students' ability to lead high-performing teams through effective design and development. You will learn why many teams fail to deliver expected results and will gain in-depth knowledge of practices of successful teamwork. Topics include characteristics of high-performing teams, monitoring stages of team growth, developing strategies for effective group decision making, developing a team-focused organizational culture, managing effective cross-boundary collaboration, resolving conflict within and across teams, team leadership techniques, and evaluating and rewarding team performance. The course also addresses how organizations can foster innovation, strategic decision-making, and cross-functional synergies through the use of teams. It emphasizes both theory and application/skill-building, using a variety of teaching methods.
Mergers & Acquisitions
This course is designed to take an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the problems of formulating and implementing successful acquisition strategies. Our major objectives are (1) to enable you to act as a senior advisor to your CEO regarding strategic M&A and PMI issues your division or company might confront and (2) to assist you in becoming an informed consumer of just about anything written on M&A success (including pitches by professional services providers). We will introduce a framework for thinking about acquisitions as a strategic investment where the bottom line is superior shareholder performance. The course will approach acquisitions as a multi-step strategic and organizational process drawing from the fields of strategy, negotiations, finance and organizational behavior.
Modeling and Projecting Financial Statements
Various management disciplines teach you how to analyze and forecast parts of a business. Building on this foundation, this course helps you to weave your forecasts into coherent spreadsheet-based pro-forma financials. Modeling and projecting comprehensive financial statements provides a reality check on the forecasts, enables ""what if"" analysis, provides an integrated view of the business, and is a key step in valuation.
New Product Marketing & Design
This course focuses on the tools and techniques associated with analyzing market opportunities and then focuses on designing, testing, and introducing new products and services. Both quantitative and qualitative approaches are covered. In particular, the course covers the new product development process, market entry strategies, how to generate new product ideas, mapping customer perceptions, segmentation, product positioning, forecasting market demand, product design and advertising and product testing. It emphasizes how to incorporate customers and competitors into all of these aspects of new product development.
Quantitative Methods in Financial Modeling
This course will cover the use of mathematical techniques in determining value and pricing for both fixed income and equity securities. The fixed income portion will include a mathematical treatment of annuities with applications to problems in mortgage refinance, bond pricing, automobile leasing and other securities. The topics of duration and convexity and its effect on the volatility of fixed income instruments with respect to interest rate movements will be discussed. The equities portion will include a discussion of the principle of arbitrage pricing in both discrete and continuous-time setting. The famous Black-Scholes formula will be discussed along with its adaptations to options on dividend-paying stocks, futures and forward contracts. The course will also include the study of American options and the role of backward induction in pricing such options and exercising them optimally.
Strategic Marketing & Implementation
Strategic marketing is the process of creating value through the integration of all business activities and the creation of a sustainable competitive advantage. The steps are well known: analyze where your customers, competitors and company are today; determine where you want them to be tomorrow; develop a plan for getting there; and then implement it. But in the heat of the day-to-day battle to get and keep customers, there are constant pressures on managers to deviate from, if not completely forget, those carefully formulated strategies. This course builds on concepts introduced in the core marketing course, and focuses on strategic decision-making that has a long-term impact on the organization.
Structured Finance
Structured Finance is the design of debt or equity financing techniques in order to solve particular issuer or investor problems that cannot be solved by conventional methods. The goal of this course is to understand how structured financing techniques can work for bankers and corporate finance professionals. The course will be taught around several major topics employing in-depth group work on case studies, financial analysis and deal documentation. The focus will be on identifying situations that call for nonstandard corporate finance solutions, and the design and pricing of the situation-specific financing instruments. Examples of such situations include securitizations, financial restructuring, private equity and leveraged buyouts, recapitalizations, and hybrid financing techniques.
Valuation
There are as many models for valuing stocks and businesses as there are analysts doing valuations. The differences across these models are often emphasized by their users, and the common elements are often ignored. The first two and half sessions will cover discounted cash flow valuation, and the estimation issues that arise when information is noisy or unavailable; in addition, it will look at value enhancement through the prism of discounted cash flow models, and contrast techniques such as EVA and CFROI. The third and fourth sessions will center around relative valuation, i.e. the use of multiples and comparables in valuation. The final session will look at real option valuation with applications in natural resource companies, biotechnology companies and troubled telecomm firms. In the process, the common factors that run across these models, as well as the differences, will be discussed.
Download list of recent Elective Course Descriptions
Access to Additional Classes
As an Executive MBA student, you have the advantage of a wider selection of electives offered through Stern’s Langone part-time program or through other NYU programs, such as the NYU School of Law; the Robert F. Wagner School of Public Service; The Real Estate Institute at NYU’s School of Continuing and Professional Studies; or the Entertainment, Media, and Technology program at the Steinhardt School. For more information about these electives, please speak with one of our Admissions Directors.
Please note: Additional classes do not count towards graduation requirements but students can take up to 5 additional classes at approved NYU graduate programs while enrolled in the Executive MBA program.
Courses After Graduating
Stern’s Executive MBA students can take two courses through Stern’s Langone program within two years after graduating. These courses are offered at a reduced fee.
In addition, on a space available basis, alumni are invited to return to NYU Stern to take elective courses in the Executive MBA program. We now offer a wide array of elective courses that our alumni enjoy coming back to take.
As students in these courses, alumni are responsible for the cost of books and materials. There is also a nonrefundable administrative fee for participation to cover mandatory University fees. Grades in each course are added to the alumnus's NYU Stern transcript as the School does not permit auditing of courses. Alumni may register for up to six credits of EMBA electives per semester. Elective courses generally meet in Friday-Saturday combinations every other week.
