COURSE NUMBER:  MBA235.1

COURSE TITLE:  Advanced Topics in Financial Institutions and Financial Markets:  Risk Management

UNITS OF CREDIT:  2

INSTRUCTOR:  Jim Wilcox

E-MAIL ADDRESS:  jwilcox@haas.berkeley.edu

CLASS WEB PAGE LOCATION (HTTP URL):

MEETING DAY(S)/TIME:  Monday, 2:00-4:00 PM

PREREQUISITIES: BA203 AND BA232 OR INSTRUCTOR APPROVAL

CLASS FORMAT:  Lectures, in-class discussion and presentations, outside speakers

REQUIRED READINGS:  Risk Management, McGraw-Hill, 2001 by Michel Crouhy, Dan Galai, Robert Mark
Book of articles:  Mastering Risk v.1 Concepts

COURSE DESCRIPTION:

Risk management has long been an integral part of the general management of all kinds of firms, both financial and nonfinancial.  In recent years, however, risk management has garnered a much larger share of management attention.  Impressive analytical advances, better data, cheaper computational costs, some large and highly publicized losses, and increased attention by regulators have shifted focus at financial institutions to explicitly quantifying and managing risks.  As a result, firms of all kinds, and financial institutions in particular, are now pursuing much broader and more disciplined approaches to risk management.

This course address why and how financial institutions measure and manage various risks.  The course will familiarize students with methods for identifying, measuring, and managing market, credit, catastrophe, and other risks in banking.  The approach of the course will be to provide a survey that will help future executives understand risk issues.  The course will not focus narrowly on the technical aspects of pricing of derivatives or of the design of information programs and systems.

Over the course of the semester, we plan to intersperse a few in-class case studies and presentations by outside speakers with the instructors’ lectures and students’ in-class discussions and presentations.  Students will have to purchase a Harvard case or two.

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH:
James A. Wilcox is the Kruttschnitt Professor of Financial Institutions at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley.  Jim teaches courses in financial markets and institutions, in business conditions analysis, in forecasting, and in risk management.  He has also served as Chair of the Finance Group at Berkeley.

Jim has written widely on issues in bank lending, credit markets, real estate markets, monetary policy, and business conditions.  His research has addressed the causes and consequences of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, the effects on bank executives of mergers, the ability of banks to reduce costs following mergers, the differences in bank supervision and regulation around the world, the effects of bank loan losses and capital pressures on lending and small businesses, the demographic effects on residential real estate prices, and the efficiencies and credit effects of electronic payments.  His articles have been published in the American Economic Review, the Journal of Finance, the Journal of Economic Perspectives, the Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, the Journal of Banking and Finance, the Journal of Housing Economics, the Review of Economics and Statistics, and elsewhere.

In 1999, Jim became the Chief Economist at the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency in Washington, DC.  He has also served as the senior economist for monetary policy and macroeconomics for the President’s Council of Economic Advisers and as an economist for the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System.  He received his Ph.D. in economics from Northwestern University.