Stanford MBA Elective Helps Students Learn Broad Impact of Finance

A new elective course for the MBA program at the Stanford Graduate School of Business helps students to learn more about the broad implications of finance. Anat Admati teaches the Finance and Society elective course. She is a well-known critic of current banking regulations. In her class, she helps students learn to understand and critically analyze the economic and human implications of finance. For the class, Admati teaches by bringing together different expert viewpoints on banking, law, accounting, politics, financial regulation and the media.

There is no math taught in the class, but the main principles and theories are reviewed for discussions. Readings from the course are from the professor’s book “The Bankers’ New Clothes: What’s Wrong with Banking and What to Do about It” as well as documents from the Federal Reserve, media stories, guest essays and news commentary. For MBA students, Admati brings guest speakers to help to enrich the course with real-world perspectives and insights into the industry and the policy issues.

Students in the course learn how to build on the basics of finance as well as explore the big picture issues and the granular legal details and incentives. Assignments for the course include critical analyses of media. In these analyses, students are required to read and interpret a seemingly straightforward news story and examine its validity and context.

“Courses like this impart a rich perspective that can’t be found in a textbook or from reciting the basics of finance,” Senior Associate Dean for Academic Affairs Madhav Rajan said. “They offer real-world insights to guide their careers years into the future.”

regions: San Francisco

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