Master Electives

Tailor your msc in finance & investments to your interests. master electives are characterised by their strong emphasis on recent academic and practical insights.

Portfolio Management
The objective of this course is to expose students to both fundamental concepts and cutting edge theories and tools in portfolio management. We will cover active portfolio strategies in bonds and stocks, optimal portfolio construction from the perspective of individual and institutional investors, and the role of style and performance benchmarks and tracking errors in portfolio management. Special topics, such as global portfolio management and the hedge fund industry, will also be covered. Real financial data and case studies will be used to illustrate the various methodologies introduced in this course.

Valuation: Managing for Value
This course is about value management. We will begin with the basic concepts: what is value and why should we look at it? How do we measure value? Why value, and not other measures? Why should companies manage value? We then look at the practice of value creation. How does a company create value for its shareholders? Specific topics are: managing for value (budgeting-planning-strategy-value; why managing for value); valuation of corporate investments (valuation of M&A, of growth investments such as R&D, appraisals and of information); and the practice of project appraisal. This course provides the skills to value a company using a spreadsheet approach to valuation. We will look at the finance theory behind these techniques and explain extensively and critically how valuation is done in practice.

Real Estate Finance and Investments
In this course the focus is on financial topics related to investing in real estate from the professional investor’s perspective. The course combines theoretical topics and empirical methods with the actual practices of real estate professionals. Some of the topics included in this course are: private real estate performance evaluation, real estate investment strategies, the direct-indirect real estate puzzle, and the surge of mortgage backed securities. The primary objectives of the course are to get a thorough knowledge of the working of prudent investment concepts within the real estate arena as well as the tools to analyse different investment opportunities.

Treasury Management
This course provides knowledge of capital markets, money markets, financial instruments and risk management, which has become essential for managing the treasury department of companies. The globalization of the economy as well as the mobilization of funds between regions induced a growing attention in the area of treasury and foreign exchange risk management. The first purpose of this course is to handle short term investment and financing decisions. The second purpose is to discuss strategies for risk management in non-financial firms, including commodity, interest rate and currency price risk. Finally, the course provides an overview of international treasury management for multinationals, where we will discover how to reduce exposure to currency movements.

Banking and Financial Intermediation
This elective discusses corporate finance topics from the perspective of banks and financial intermediaries. These institutions play an important role for firms and capital markets by helping firms to reduce transaction costs, information asymmetries, and contracting costs. Banks arrange loans and provide certified advice. The objective of this course is to develop a better understanding of the roles of financial intermediaries.

Behavioural Corporate Finance
This course focuses on psychological and sociological issues in corporate financial-decision making. Psychologists and sociologists have documented many behavioural deviations from rational behaviour based on real-world analyses. In this course, these biases are related to the key areas in corporate finance: capital budgeting, capital structure, valuation, dividend policy, corporate governance, and mergers and acquisitions. Behavioural pitfalls are identified, and opportunities to improve decision-making are discussed.

Advanced Financial Statement Analysis
This course offers an in-depth analysis of valuation methods and techniques introduced in the core course Financial Analysis. The course focuses on the analysis of financial statements for valuation purposes. We examine various aspects of fascinating financial reporting practices, with an emphasis on understanding their economic foundation, their representation in a firm’s financial statements, and their valuation consequences. Topics that will pass review are, among others, goodwill impairment, valuation of financial instruments and off-balance sheet liabilities, employee benefits and executive compensation (share-based payments). A thorough understanding of the financial reporting concepts presented in this course will enhance students’ ability to use the information in corporate financial statements for valuation purposes and making sound investment decisions. This course is offered by the Department of Accounting and Control.

Professional Asset Management
This elective focuses on examining and explaining the existence, management and performance of pools of capital. We will initially concentrate on three institutions: pension funds, mutual funds, and hedge funds. The approach will be both normative and positive. In addition to portfolio theory, topics will include the theory for the existence of these institutions, models of how they should perform, an examination of how they have performed, and analysis of structural changes that might improve their performance. The objective of the course is to understand how well these institutions have served the needs of the investor and retirement communities and how they can better do so.

Fixed Income Markets
The size of the international bond market is currently estimated to be around USD 50 trillion, with a daily trading volume of almost USD 1 trillion. This course explores the government, municipal and corporate debt markets. Besides becoming familiar with the institutions and instruments in bond markets in the US and Europe, you will also get an understanding of the theoretical determinants of the pricing of various bonds. Topics reviewed include the term structure of interest rates, interest rate risk, duration and convexity, default risk, inflation indexed bonds, STRIPS, mortgage backed securities, and the pricing of junk bonds.

Mergers, Acquisitions and Complex Business Transactions
Business managers, financial analysts, M&A and business strategy consultants have one thing in common: they should be able understand the fundamental concepts of finance and accounting to undertake sophisticated business transactions. This course provides in-depth knowledge on firm valuation, firm performance and financial statement analysis. While the main focus will be on M&A transactions, we will also look into situations of financial distress, restructuring, and bankruptcy. The course integrates finance with financial statement analysis to teach students to apply the knowledge from both areas in situations that involve complex business transactions like mergers and acquisitions. During the course we will use a number of high-profile cases to study real-world situations that span a wide range of businesses, strategies, and transaction types. This course is offered by the Department of Accounting and Control.

Entrepreneurial Finance and Private Equity
The objective of this course is to provide you with a state-of-the-art understanding of the valuation of small and mid-cap public and private firms, and the economics of contracts as it applies to entrepreneurship and private equity. This course is aimed at students who at some point in their careers plan to start, acquire, finance or work for entrepreneurial, fast-growing businesses. It will also be useful for students who plan to join venture capital/private equity firms, investment banks or financial departments of multinational companies. The course is case-oriented and aims at instructing you in how “real world” professional investors and corporate managers operate to create wealth from entrepreneurial activity.

Derivatives
This course on derivatives covers the essentials of forwards, futures, swaps, and options. You will learn how these products work, how they are used, how they are priced, and how financial institutions and other financial market participants hedge their risks when they trade these products. Moreover, you will have the opportunity to train the theoretical knowledge on derivatives in practical cases and assignments.

Advanced Asset Pricing
This course consists of two parts (Asset Pricing Theory and Empirical Asset Pricing). The goal is to provide a profound and state-of-the-art insight into asset pricing. The field of asset pricing aims to explain the prices of financial assets such as stocks, fixed income instruments and derivative securities. The field is highly relevant for research in financial economics, because asset pricing models form the basis for any study in investments and are also fundamental to many financial management applications such as capital budgeting, risk management, portfolio selection and performance evaluation. The first part of the course gives an overview of the fundamental principles of finance starting from expected utility theory, equilibrium and no-arbitrage. Subsequently, we will discuss standard finance results in mean-variance efficiency and extend them to the multifactor efficiency, conditional efficiency, and models with non-marketable assets. The second part is set up in a seminar-style with presentations and discussions on different topics in empirical asset pricing. We study the new advances in factor models, such as liquidity factors and the idiosyncratic volatility factors. We also cover behavioural asset pricing models as well as the intersection between real economy and asset pricing by looking at the consumption-based asset pricing. This course is offered in cooperation with the Erasmus Research Institute of Management.

Advanced Corporate Finance
This advanced course consists of two parts. In the theoretical part, we focus on agency problems that affect the choices of corporations at various levels, which represent the core of modern corporate finance theory. We will review theoretical models studying how firms can obtain the necessary outside financing in the presence of information asymmetry and conflicts of interest. We will study problems of credit rationing, the optimal maturity structure of debt, the determinants of borrowing capacity of firms, and pecking order theories. We will further discuss the optimal allocation of control rights, investigating the role of blockholders, debtors, and takeovers. The theoretical part concludes with a session on executive compensation and dynamic continuous time models. In the empirical part, we start with an introduction into the prevailing topics in the literature and the tools applied in empirical studies. A set of empirical studies will be discussed in the lectures, in which finance theories are tested; applications are included of the most important empirical methods in finance. We discuss topics like capital structure choice, dividend policy, banking, risk management, private equity, M&A and international corporate finance. This course is offered in cooperation with the Erasmus Research Institute of Management.