Executive MBA Blog
RSS EMBA Course Electives
With the most electives of any business school, Wharton offers you the flexibility to customize your study. Each executive MBA class participates in the selection of a set of electives from nearly 200 graduate courses offered. Students then fill their elective slots from this subset of courses. Students can change coasts for one term if a desired course is not offered in the student's primary program location.
During the second year, students also have the option of designing an independent study project, which provides the opportunity for in-depth research. For first-year students whose background and qualifications enable them to waive out of the core Financial Accounting course, the independent project is an alternative option. A student may earn up to 2 course units of independent study.
The following elective courses, organized by discipline, were selected by recent classes:
- Accounting / Finance
- Health Care
- Insurance and Risk Management
- Legal Studies and Negotiations
- Management and Strategy
- Marketing
- Operations and Information Management
- Real Estate
Accounting / Finance
- Corporate Finance
Studies the major decision-making areas of managerial finance and topics in financial theory. Discusses the theory and empirical evidence related to investment and financing policies and develops students' decision-making ability in these areas. Includes leasing, mergers and acquisitions, corporate reorganizations, financial planning, and working capital management. - Financial Derivatives
A rigorous and applied study of the pricing and trading of derivative securities. Includes using alternate strategies to implement a desired position and to evaluate the associated risk and reward. Covers the application of these quantitative techniques to problems in corporate financial risk management. - International Finance
Focuses on international financial markets and exchange rates. Includes pricing in foreign currency markets, forward exchange, short-term returns and international money market efficiency, foreign currency options and financing, and exposure management. - Investment Management
Introduces students to concepts of portfolio analysis in institutional investment management. Examines how to establish appropriate investment objectives, develop optimal portfolio strategies, estimate risk-return tradeoffs, and evaluate investment performance. Discusses many of the latest quantitative approaches. - Venture Capital and the Finance of Innovation
The finance of technological innovation, with a focus on the valuation tools useful in the venture capital industry. These tools include the "venture capital method," comparables analysis, discounted cash flow analysis, Monte Carlo simulation, contingent-claims analysis, decision trees, and real options.
Health Care
- Topics in Health Care
Designed for students involved or interested in the business aspects of health care. Draws on the expertise of selected Wharton faculty and guest lecturers to examine diverse issues such as the economics and financing of health care, corporate America's role, the business paradigm in health care, the pharmaceutical industry, information technology for delivery systems, and legal aspects of managed care.
Insurance & Risk Management
- Risk and Crisis Management
Risk management is becoming increasingly important and firms are devoting increasing time, attention and resources to deriving strategies for preserving value. These strategies include, hedging, insurance, contingent financing and changes in organizational design which make the firm more robust to shocks.
Legal Studies and Negotiations
- Negotiation and Dispute Resolution
Considers the art and science of creating sound agreements. Students develop managerial negotiation skills through cases and exercises where they examine one-shot deals, repeated negotiations, negotiations over several issues, multi-party negotiations, and cross-cultural issues.
Management and Strategy
- Corporate Development: Mergers and Acquisitions
Explores the use of corporate acquisitions as a method of affecting substantial changes in the business mix of large corporations. Focuses on the impact of acquisitions on the acquiring and target firms. Examines theoretical issues and their managerial implications. - Entrepreneurship through Acquisition
Focuses on the theoretical and practical issues of acquiring a business, including the following topics: locating a business, obtaining information on the entity, reviewing and analyzing data, valuation, financing the deal, and the actual acquisition process in terms of structuring the acquisition. - Formation and Implementation of Entrepreneurial Ventures
Examines ways to profitably launch and exploit business opportunities (as opposed to what opportunity to explore). It will allow you to acquire the skill set necessary for crafting a winning business model for your venture — developing and writing a coherent and effective plan to start a business in either an independent or a corporate setting. - Geopolitics
Explores the structure and evolution of the international political-economic system and then applies a basic model to several critical issues areas such as the European Community, technology policy, strategic alliances, and national competitiveness. The emphasis of the course is on implications for multinational strategy. - Managing Organizational Change
Focuses on specific concepts, theories and tools that can assist executives entrusted with the task of leading organizational change. Among other topics, the course will focus on the politics of change, successfully leading change efforts, downsizing, restructuring and reengineering, and organizational adaptation. - Strategic Planning and Control
Focuses on strategic management from the viewpoint of top management, emphasizing corporate planning and control. Includes both theory and practice, alternative theories of planning/control and strategic management, environmental scanning, and incorporation of critical external factors in the planning process.
Marketing
- Marketing Research
A rigorous examination of marketing research methods: techniques of data collection, evaluation of alternative sources of information, and methods of evaluating data and presenting the results. - Marketing Strategy
Discusses problems in high-level marketing decision making, with strategic marketing planning frameworks for their analysis. Includes methods for industry analysis and competitive appraisals. Examines industry growth, market share, customer behavior, and marketing costs. - New Product Development
Focuses on product decisions of consumer and industrial firms and non-profit organizations. Explores product policy in marketing and corporate management, concepts, product deletion and modification, and organizing for new and existing products. - Pricing Policy
Provides a systematic presentation of the factors to be considered when setting price, and shows how pricing alternatives are developed. Analytical methods are developed and new approaches are explored for solving pricing decisions.
Operations and Information Management
- Mathematical Modeling
Quantitative methods have become fundamental tools in the analysis and planning of financial operations. There are many reasons for this development: the emergence of a whole range of new complex financial instruments, innovations in securitization, the volatility of fixed-income markets since interest rate deregulation, the increased globalization of the financial markets, the proliferation of information technology, and so on. In this course, models for hedging, asset allocation, and multi-period portfolio planning are developed, implemented, and tested. In addition, pricing models for options, bonds, mortgage-backed securities, and swaps are discussed.
Real Estate
- Real Estate Investments
To expose you to the terms, issues, and topics in commercial real estate and to give you the basic skills and intuition you need to begin to evaluate a variety of real estate investments.
