COURSE NUMBER:EWMBA 217-11
COURSE TITLE: International Finance
UNITS OF CREDIT: 1 Unit
INSTRUCTOR: Dean Richard Lyons
E-MAIL ADDRESS: lyons@haas.berkeley.edu
MEETING DAY(S)/TIME: Saturdays, Week 11-15 (4/10-5/15), 1:00 pm to 4:00 pm
PREREQUISITE(S): EWMBA core curriculum
REQUIRED READINGS: The required text is Multinational Financial Management by Alan Shapiro (New York: Wiley). There is a reader with additional articles. I expect you to keep abreast of international topics; I strongly recommend a student's subscription to either The Economist or the Financial Times.
BASIS FOR FINAL GRADE: There will be problem sets (25% of grade), an applied project (25%), and a final (50%). The applied project is an opportunity to tailor the course to specific interests. I encourage working together on the problem sets and the applied project: 3 per group maximum, hand in one copy per group.
ABSTRACT OF COURSE'S CONTENT AND OBJECTIVES:
The course is organized around 3 modules:
The broad coverage makes it relevant to a wide range of professional interests (e.g., corporate finance, global portfolio management, and corporate treasury management). The main objective is to enable students to work effectively in the context of international financial uncertainty. International financial events are both pervasive and important. Firms and investors cannot afford to neglect them. Those with expertise find it an enduring source of advantage.
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH:
Richard K. Lyons became the Bank of America Dean of the Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley, in July 2008. He is a graduate of the school’s undergraduate business program.
Dean Lyons has focused his first year in office on refining the Haas School’s strategic plan to leverage the traits that are distinctively Berkeley. He also launched the public phase of a $300 million capital campaign, the Campaign for Haas. Its goals are centered on transforming the Haas School campus, building a curriculum based on the Berkeley-Haas approach to leadership, and aggressively expanding the school’s faculty and its support for research.
Prior to becoming dean, Lyons served as the chief learning officer at Goldman Sachs in New York, where he was responsible for leadership development among the firm's managing directors.
Dean Lyons started his career as a professor of finance. He joined the Haas School in 1993. In 2004, he was named acting dean of the school for one year and then continued his strategic duties here as executive associate dean from 2005 to 2008.
His academic research has explored currency markets, a focus reflected in his book The Microstructure Approach to Exchange Rates (MIT Press). This novel approach to exchange rates examines the market from a trading-room perspective, e.g., the flow of buy and sell orders and why those orders subsequently affect prices, rather than from the traditional perspective of macroeconomics. This line of work focuses on how dispersed information gets reflected in prices via trading. He has published many articles in professional journals on these and other related topics.
Recently, his research has taken a quite different tack, namely, exploring the links between leadership and innovation in organizations. These links are of strategic importance to the Haas School’s approach to developing business leaders.
Dean Lyons is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He serves on the UC Berkeley Foundation and on the steering committee of UC Berkeley's Blum Center for Developing Economies.
His past consulting relationships include the Federal Reserve Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank, and Citibank. Prior to joining Goldman Sachs, he served as chair of the Board of Directors of Matthews Asian Funds, and a member of the Board of Directors of iShares (Barclays Global Investors). In 1998 Lyons received UC Berkeley's highest teaching honor, the Distinguished Teaching Award. His students have honored him with the Haas School's Cheit Award for Excellence in Teaching six times.
Following his undergraduate studies at Berkeley, Lyons continued his academic career at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Business in New York. He earned his PhD in international and macroeconomics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).