Come join me this Thursday, September 4 at 7 pm at The Kings English bookstore in Salt Lake City!
I’ll be signing books, telling tales out of school, and giving the inside scoop on Roadside MBA. Should be a fun time.
Undergraduate Microeconomics Fall Syllabus
And in the final post of the “Fall Syllabi” Series, here’s what’s going on in my undergraduate BUS 2010 course this fall. I haven’t taught undergraduates since the Fall of 2012 back at Utah State, so this should be a fun time. I’ll be bringing in more than a few guests, with the hope of illustrating microeconomic decision-making using the stories of local businesspeople (in good Roadside MBA fashion.)
Advanced Managerial Economics Fall Syllabus
I’m teaching an MBA class called “Advanced Managerial Economics” this fall at the University of Utah’s David Eccles School of Business. With a title like that, pretty much any topic is fair game, so I’ll be doing a course on Personnel Economics. It’s closely related to a course I taught last spring at the Kellogg School of Management called “Personnel Strategy”.
For interested parties, the syllabus is here:
MBA Managerial Economics — Fall Preview
After more than two years with no teaching for me at the U of Utah, it’s back to the salt mines this fall. I’m teaching three different courses fall term (a bit overwhelming, for sure), so I figure I better get started preparing early.
The long break has given me a good opportunity to re-think the MBA Managerial Economics course I developed for the U of U around 2006-7. That course worked well, but it was designed to move seamlessly between the U’s full-time MBA program, part-time MBA program, and executive MBA program. And that meant constructing course modules that could flip between the part-time program’s ten 4-hour classes and the full-time program’s 28 80-minute classes.
I’m only teaching in the full-time MBA program these days, and that frees me from some constraints. So, I’ve reorganized around four broad modules that I’m currently building out specific topics under:
- Foundations of Business Economics
- Economics of Oligopolistic Competition
- Economics of Perfect Competition
- Economics of Information
As with previous iterations of the course, it’s not an intermediate micro course but rather a first-step toward understanding the economics of business.
I’m also going to be teaching four or five case studies, which I haven’t done with U of U MBAs before. (Plenty of case teaching at Kellogg, though…) So, I’m looking forward to fall term. Might even be able to pull a few Roadside MBA examples into the class…
Food for Thought for Hiring Managers
I’m teaching at Kellogg this spring term, although it didn’t feel much like spring when I got out of a cab this morning at O’Hare…
The course is “Personnel Strategy” and applies economics to think through the link between a firm’s human resource decisions and its overall strategy. Topics include hiring, human capital, turnover and retention, reward systems (promotions, career-concerns, benefits vs. wages), labor market discrimination, and more. It’s designed for general managers and consultants, rather than people who want careers as HR administrators.
And here’s some food for thought (courtesty of David Brooks at the NYT), for students in the class and others who are interested in this topic. Brooks is a bit critical of how firms hire, and paints what might be an attractive alternative. But you might ask yourself… If the way we do it is so wrong, then why do we do it that way? And what are the potential problems with the alternatives he proposes?