Product innovation in the asset management industry has led to a proliferation of alternative funds and investment strategies, many of which are in nontraditional, often illiquid, asset classes. This course provides a comprehensive understanding of alternative investments, how to evaluate them (risks and returns), and the role they play in portfolio diversification. The course covers many prevalent strategies including private credit, private equity, structured credit, real assets, and hedge funds. Students form teams of investment analysts tasked with evaluating an alternative investment opportunity for the chief investment officer of a university endowment fund.

This practical course equips students with the skills necessary to realize their entrepreneurial visions. Students will learn about the entrepreneurial process, from the preliminary stages of research, to the legalities of setting up, as well as financials and marketing. Students will be introduced to the different types of enterprises, for profit and nonprofit, as well as social entrepreneurship. Through real examples, the course takes a closer look at common pitfalls, and stories of successes within the business world. 

Class time is divided between interactive lecture and guided hands-on work. Students will be expected to develop a business idea over the duration of the course, culminating in a final presentation and the submission of a business plan proposal. 

Participants are required to bring laptops for this class and should have an entrepreneurial idea in mind that they would like to develop during the duration of the course.

This course is designed for students who have an interest in the future of finance, technology, blockchain, cryptocurrency, artificial intelligence, and work. Beginning with an exploration of Fintech (financial technology), we explore technology’s impact on everything from banking to real estate to Wall Street. Additionally, we look at how artificial intelligence (AI) will automate and reduce the need for human workers, as AI, Fintech, and other technologies are combined to automate many tasks.

After gaining a solid understanding of the real-world use cases of Fintech and the everyday ways it impacts the economy, social justice, and our lives, students take a journey of discovery into the world of AI, the Internet of Things (IoT), blockchain, Bitcoin, and cryptocurrency. Since Bitcoin’s launch in 2009, cryptocurrency and decentralized ledger technology, aka blockchain, have emerged as an economic force majeure, disrupting the fundamentals of how people interact and how they perceive money. In addition to pushing the evolution of money, blockchain technology is now poised to disrupt how we organize businesses and the future of work. Course participants explore the organizational impacts and transformations caused by blockchain and cryptocurrencies and examine what this will mean to them as future CEOs and global business and thought leaders.

The course concludes by exploring the perspective of entrepreneurs and innovators, further examining how technologies come together to form the businesses, disruptions, and methodologies of the 21st Century. Participants walk away with a fundamental understanding of what tokens and cryptocurrencies are; how businesses leverage blockchain technology, AI, and other Fintech applications; and how digital transformation impacts social interactions and the future of work.

Please note: This course is not a computer programming course and requires no prior knowledge or experience, but rather looks at these emerging technologies more broadly from business, social, political, and cultural perspectives.

This course takes an applied, practical approach to understanding how and why financial markets experience cycles of rapid growth, speculation, and collapse. By examining key episodes such as the Great Depression, the dot-com bubble, the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, and the recent rise of meme stocks and cryptocurrencies, students learn to identify recurring patterns and the underlying economic, psychological, and policy forces that shape them. 

Class time is divided between interactive lectures, instructional games, and guided hands-on work. During the course, students gain insights into how markets reflect human behavior, innovation, and risk-taking. Students can expect to learn how to:

• Analyze the causes and consequences of major financial crises across history
• Understand how investor behavior and decision-making contribute to bubbles and crashes
• Assess the impact of government regulation and policy responses on financial stability
• Analyze current market data to evaluate where today’s markets may sit in the boom-and-bust cycle

Do you want to make a difference in the world? Social entrepreneurship bridges passion and action, where business principles meet social impact to address today’s most urgent challenges. Can economic growth align with sustainability? How can social entrepreneurs find solutions to climate resilience or help communities in need? In this course, you will dive into these questions, exploring the dynamic balance between fiscal responsibility and social equity in an ever-changing global landscape.

Through a hands-on journey into social entrepreneurship, you will explore key frameworks for turning challenges into opportunities, learning how to design solutions that benefit shareholders and stakeholders to deliver a “triple bottom line”—people, planet, and profit. Through collaborative projects, lively debates, and case studies, you’ll analyze real-world issues and develop strategic approaches that make a lasting impact. 

This intensive 2-week course provides students with a comprehensive introduction to entrepreneurial finance and the management of new ventures. The course explores how to identify business opportunities, validate ideas, design business models, and evaluate financing options. Students will develop the skills to analyze start-up opportunities, understand the fundraising process, and prepare compelling venture presentations.

Key topics include:

• The start-up lifecycle (ideation to exit)
• Opportunity recognition and market validation
• Lean start-up methodology and MVP development
• Business models and value proposition design
• Financing options (bootstrapping, angel investors, venture capital, crowdfunding, accelerators)
• Entrepreneurial finance fundamentals: valuation, term sheets, SAFE/convertible notes
• Key metrics that matter (traction, TAM, CAC, LTV, churn, burn)
• Pitching and communicating the venture story
• Managing growth, scaling challenges, and founder’s mindset

Students will work in teams on a mini-venture project, culminating in a final presentation that simulates an investor pitch.

This course is recommended for students who have previously taken an introductory course in business, economics, or entrepreneurship.

This course provides students with strategies and tools to elevate the efficacy of social innovations by integrating insights from behavioral science research and practice. Through readings and hands-on innovation projects, participants will gain skills to deeply understand user psychology, frame opportunities focused on specific behavior changes, develop interventions using evidence-based techniques, rapidly prototype concepts, and rigorously evaluate impact on behaviors. 

The sessions cover opportunity framing, customer discovery, creative ideation, prototyping, and experimentation. Students will learn how applying behavioral economics, psychology, and cognitive science can enhance the innovation process and drive positive social change.

Intended for students interested in creating new business or social enterprises, this hands-on course focuses on the creation, evaluation, development, and launch-readiness of new business or social ventures. Participants are guided through the new venture creation process as applied to student team-selected venture ideas. Through interactive lectures, short case studies, and structured peer activities, students explore the elements of the new venture planning process in an innovative modular format.

For each student venture, key issues are addressed in a fashion highly consistent with other formal venture-planning processes including: business model development, customer discovery, product-market validation, in-depth industry and market analysis, product or service innovation, brand development and go-to-market strategies, team selection and management, profit models, financing, and legal considerations.

Students work through a series of structured activities and assignments that correspond with each phase of new venture planning. Throughout the class they refine their venture’s hypothesized business model on the basis of instructor and peer feedback. At each stage of venture plan development, they learn critical terms, apply tools that support research and decision making, and develop a deep understanding of how each major planning activity fits into formal venture creation. Additionally, they hone critical professional skills including creative problem-solving, communication and negotiation, project management, financial analysis, and collaborative leadership. By the end of the class, participants have generated robust business models, with supportive venture plan documents, investor pitches, websites, and crowd-funding videos. 

This intensive course takes an applied, practical approach to the development, testing, and validation of customer or community-driven product solutions. By learning and applying contemporary design-thinking concepts and tools, students generate innovative solutions to important customer or community problems. During the program, students identify and define a major problem to be solved, work with real customers to better understand the problem from their perspective, generate multiple solutions, then choose a solution to test with real customers. Students acquire practical knowledge and tools focusing on the development, testing, and validation of new products that solve real customer problems and needs, from idea to early product development.

Students can expect to learn how to:

• identify and articulate customer problems in an accurate way, reflecting how individuals truly experience the problem and its challenges
• create effective customer surveys to help validate your assumptions on customer problems (pain points), solutions, and benefits (expected outcomes)
• assess current solutions provided in the marketplace in order to build on best practices as well as identify gap areas
• develop a minimal viable product in order to gain additional feedback on specific solution features
• measure and validate customer needs fulfillment or social impact assumptions
• develop a solution (business or social enterprise) model to test your assumptions about customer interests, acceptance, and use

In-Person participants are expected to bring laptops for this class.

This course equips students with tools to assess, critique, and design FinTech applications, preparing them for careers in banking, asset management, consulting, and entrepreneurship. Throughout the course, students will explore the rapidly evolving financial technology (FinTech) landscape, focusing on how technology is disrupting and transforming traditional financial services. Topics include mobile payments, trading algorithms, blockchain and cryptocurrencies, robo-advisors, and AI in finance. Students will examine real-world case studies, participate in simulation-based analysis, and develop both analytical and communication skills relevant to the FinTech ecosystem.

Game theory is the science of strategy. Within this ever-evolving field, practitioners are responsible for working through economic concepts that depend on rationality, as well as choice and uncertainty. Specifically, those working in this field help with optimal decision making between an independent agent and competing actors. The result of this work can take many forms, including when (and if) to launch a product and how to price it, or when to be cooperative in a negotiation (or not), or even whether to confess to a crime (or not). Throughout the course, students will study the works of key pioneers in Game Theory, as well as synthesize and triangulate readings to topics in economics, business, political science, and project management. Students will be expected to apply learnings to solve complex probability sets and analyze decision-maker payoffs. By the end of the course, students will have a new appreciation for how Game Theory directly impacts - and influences - major decisions. Additionally, they will be able to work through choices and outcomes better in their own lives. 

What is the impact of the resurgence of populism, nativism, and geopolitical competition on foreign relations and economic growth? Is China’s push to turn the renminbi into a global currency a threat or an opportunity? What are the implications of an unsustainable levels of public debt (U.S., Europe, Latin America, and Asia) on the future of international monetary and financial architecture? Given questions such as these, this course examines the interplay between globalizing pressures and national interests.

Working from a multilateral perspective, students use case studies to examine the nature of relations between nation-states in a period of increased economic and political integration. Topics include theories of international political economy in relation to foreign aid and sovereign debt, international trade and capital flows, security and non-state actors, rights-based approaches to development and humanitarian emergencies, energy sustainability, and the role of international organizations and financial institutions.

For counterpoint, students also examine the political, ideological, and social determinants of domestic political economies, including that of the United States. The political mechanisms of economic policy-making and the relationship between domestic policy and foreign policy are explored using theoretical, historical, and topical cases; examples include the political economy of income distribution and social welfare, national defense and hegemony, the national debt, and globalization.

Students examine these and other topics through lecture, research, academic and policy dialogue, group projects and presentations, and peer critiques. For students enrolled in the in-person program, the course typically includes a visit to the United Nations Headquarters.

Students should have “business casual” outfits for UN field trips and need identification (ID card, drivers license, or passport) for entry.

This course focuses on the firm’s financial and economic behavior. The firm needs cash to undertake worthy investments, and the firm needs to identify investments worth undertaking. What models does the firm use to identify such investments? What sources of cash can the firm use? How do the financial markets in which this money is raised function? How does the market value the firm, its securities, and its investments? What financial instruments are available to the firm? What are the microeconomic models that best describe a firm’s behavior in such markets?

In answering these questions, the participants discuss stocks, bonds, stock markets, as well as valuation models of investments, firms, and securities. They also work with concepts like optimal investment strategies, what is revealed and what is hidden in published accounting statements, and what are some of the sources of risk. Students also acquire familiarity with the mechanics and history of the financial markets.

The course includes case studies and some sustained independent work by the participants. Laptops, while not required, are highly recommended for In-Person participants. 

Students should have “business casual” outfits for potential field trips and may need identification (ID card, drivers license, or passport) for entry. 

This introductory-level course is intended for students who have an interest in learning more about how corporations make business decisions and fund those decisions. The course provides a brief introduction to the fundamentals of finance, emphasizing their application to a wide variety of real-world situations in corporate decision-making and financial intermediation. Key concepts and applications include the time value of money, risk-return tradeoff, cost of capital, interest rates, discounted cash flow (DCF) analysis, net present value, internal rate of return, hurdle rate, and payback period. Students will leave with an understanding of both sound theoretical principles of finance and practical tools of financial decision-making.

Participants learn the principles of finance and investment management, to include interest rates and compound interest, the time value of money, risk and reward, how stocks and bonds are valued, how the stock market functions, how the international financial market functions, and how to approach stock selection and portfolio management.

We explore the structure of the financial system, to include the role of individual participants, investment banks, asset managers, the Central Bank, and other players in the global economy. The course connects foundations of economics to financial markets. What is the role of risk in investment? How does the environment of the market and the broader world drive return on investments? Why have some investments done well in memorable history? Why have others not done well? How are the winners and losers of past investments explained by financial theory? What is the role of traditional investments, such as mutual funds, and of alternative investments, such as venture capital, private equity and hedge funds?

Students generate their own investment strategies and portfolios. 

As this is a quantitative course, students should be comfortable with math and prepared for a challenging experience.

News reports on developments in financial markets or trends in important economic indicators like the unemployment rate can often give the impression that “the economy” is something akin to the weather, an aspect of the natural world whose ups-and-downs we may try to predict but that we must ultimately take as given. In reality, however, the economy is us: large-scale economic phenomena result from the aggregated effects of small-scale decisions – for instance, about how we spend our money or use our time – that all of us confront each and every day.

This course is designed to offer an engaging introduction to microeconomics, or the study of decision-making in the face of trade-offs and constraints. Motivated by practical questions about how individuals strive to balance work and leisure or how businesses decide to set prices for their products and services, students will become acquainted with foundational concepts in economics like opportunity cost, scarcity, comparative advantage, and economic rent. Class activities and exercises will provide opportunities for hands-on learning, and collaborative group work will allow students the chance to apply newfound knowledge to real-world issues, such as environmental regulation or the impact of emerging technologies on the labor market.

Those who successfully complete the course will be well-positioned for future studies at the undergraduate level in both economics and related fields, and will also come away equipped with new tools for understanding the economic systems of which we are all a part.

This course explores the role of venture capital (VC) in the funding process of companies: how venture capitalists operate, their investment decision-making process, the criteria they use to evaluate investment opportunities and startup companies, the mechanics of VC fund economics, and how they support and add value to portfolio companies. 

In short, this course intersects with both finance and entrepreneurship. It will cover both the perspective of a VC investor and of an entrepreneur raising capital for their venture.  Students will engage in case studies and simulations as both entrepreneurs negotiating a capital raising round with a VC firm, and as a venture capital investor evaluating an investment opportunity, i.e. the business model of a start up company.

Looking at stocks, bonds, ETFs, cryptocurrency, real estate, futures, and options, this course introduces students to how professional investment managers construct investment portfolios. We look at these different investment opportunities as well as key valuation and risk management techniques. How might investors benefit from diversification? What are the metrics for measuring performance?  What are the common pitfalls made by investors? 

Class time is divided between interactive lecture and guided hands-on work. Participants assume the role of professional money managers as they operate their own diversified investment portfolios in a session-long simulation game. Students also are given the opportunity to interact with guest speakers, who are professionals in the field. Common theories and practices presented in class, news of current and world events, and discussion around decisions made by the world’s foremost investors are incorporated as students develop a sense of how real-time managers make decisions.

Participants are required to bring laptops for this class and, as this is a quantitative course, should be comfortable with math and prepared for a challenging experience.

What drives a country’s economy? How do we measure a nation’s wealth, and why does unemployment matter? In this fast-paced introductory course, you'll get the answers to these big questions while diving into the world of macroeconomics. Designed for students curious about the forces that shape economies, this course covers everything from economic growth to inflation, and how these concepts affect our daily lives.

Throughout the course, we’ll explore how economic output is measured (hello, GDP!), the causes of inflation and deflation, and how policies can affect everything from interest rates to international trade. Ever wondered why governments raise taxes or how central banks control money supply? You’ll get the inside scoop on fiscal and monetary policies, and discover how events like the 2008 financial crisis or global trade wars ripple across the economy. By the end of the course, you'll be able to explain the basics of economic growth, unemployment, and investment, and how these principles connect to real-world problems like income inequality and financial crises. Ready to understand how the world works on a macro scale? Together we’ll take a whirlwind tour of the economy—big picture style!

By the end of the course, students will have a solid foundation in macroeconomic theory and be able to apply their knowledge to analyze real-world economic situations, preparing them for further studies in economics or related fields.

In this course, you'll explore how statistics plays a crucial role in the world of finance. From understanding how financial markets work to learning how to manage risk and make predictions, this course introduces you to the tools that finance professionals use every day. Whether you're interested in stocks, investment strategies, or risk management, you'll gain a solid foundation in how to analyze financial data and make informed decisions using statistical methods.

Throughout the course, you'll work with real-world financial data, apply statistical techniques like probability and regression, and explore the basics of portfolio management and/or market trends. You’ll also participate in group projects, stock market simulations, and case studies that help bring the theory to life. By the end of the course, you'll not only understand how statistics and finance are connected, but you’ll also have the skills to analyze financial information and even predict future trends. Whether you're considering a career in finance, economics, or data science, this course will give you a head start and a deeper understanding of the power of numbers in the business world.

Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and other leading investment firms have predicted that the space economy will be worth trillions of dollars within the next few decades. In this course we explore a number of key issues having to do with the space industry and the emerging space economy with the intention of preparing participants to be leaders in those fields.

Potential topics to be covered include:

• How private businesses are changing the new space race
• Why space commercialization will lead to a Fifth Industrial Revolution
• What old and new financial models are enabling the growth of space technology
• The role of NASA, the Space Force, NOAA, and other government agencies
• Should we be investing in space when there are so many challenges facing humanity on Earth?
• How do businesses profit from working within the space economy?
• What does the work of SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Virgin tell us about opportunities in Low Earth Orbit (LEO), the moon, and Mars?
• What steps a business must go through to be part of the new space race
• How new private and national programs will add to the complexity and vibrancy of the economy
• What is the role of space in human rights?
• How does the improvement of communities in space lead to social and technology improvements?
• What environmental problems can be solved using space technology?
• What is the role of traditional financial institutions such as banks and mutual funds, and how does that compare to the role of family private offices, VCs, and hedge funds in disruptive industries like the space economy?

The course draws on fundamental concepts in business, economics, and finance and applies new concepts from ESG (environmental, social, and governance) investing, risk management, and social impact measurements. Participants gain a foundational understanding of business development, the importance of intellectual property, and the value of community building as part of any business strategy - how solving for space is really about solving for problems on Earth. Guest speakers represent the private sector as well as groups such as NASA, the Space Force, and international space organizations.

Students leave with the tools to place an economic lens on the business, technology, and financing of spaceports, the aerospace industry, space adjacent technology, and the space economy as a whole. From launch, to satellites, to private stations, to manufacturing in LEO, to the permanent human settlement of the moon, via the Artemis program, this course gives students insights into the future they will help build and lead.

As the final project for the course, participants generate their own investment strategies and portfolios.