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Climate change might be the defining challenge of our times, with a wide range of effects on financial markets and the broader economy. At the same time, financial markets play an important role in financing the transition to a net-zero economy, and incentivizing firms and investors to adapt their strategies. In this course, we examine how climate risks—both physical and regulatory—affect firms, financial markets (including equity, corporate debt, green bonds, municipal bonds, insurance, and carbon markets), and markets for energy, real estate and mortgages. We also examine the role that firms’ disclosures and third-party information sources play. Because financial markets are shaped by the information that is available to market participants, we investigate the impact of ESG reporting and rating agencies, including the costs and benefits of regulating ESG reporting and the impact of greenwashing. In the second part of the course, we study how governments and private investors finance investments in climate technologies. Here, we discuss various financial instruments that have been developed to address climate-change concerns. Given the enormous importance of electrification as a pathway towards a low-carbon future, there is special emphasis on renewable energy finance and economics. We also discuss the latest evidence of how climate risk has shaped decisions inside organizations, such as spin-offs, hedging, and the structure of executive-compensation contracts.

1 Course Unit

Multiple class sections
Prof. Arthur van Benthem and Prof Mirko Heinle 

It’s commonly accepted that national energy policies have direct impacts on regional security and global geopolitical dynamics. But what happens when energy itself becomes a national security issue? Contemporary headlines illustrate the risk of viewing energy policy strictly through an economic lens. Authoritarian states continue to weaponize energy resources against dependent global democracies, while democracies increasingly rely on high-profile energy sectoral sanctions and technology export controls as vital tools of economic statecraft. Both examples illustrate how actors can use energy strategically, in both offensive and defensive capacities. An understanding of these threats is essential to developing sound energy diplomacy strategies to ensure that the energy transition is realized in a way that supports regional stability, security, and human rights. This course will teach students how to develop multidisciplinary energy analysis, policy recommendations, and diplomatic strategies that can work to address these global energy security challenges. The course will assess as a case study the current European energy infrastructure landscape and ask students to propose infrastructure, regulatory, and physical/cyber security strategies from the perspective of a practitioner of energy diplomacy. The course will also teach students valuable skills related to open-source intelligence methods, including tapping into new commercial space industry data sets (each student will receive a free Planet satellite imagery account that can be used in research assignments). We will review recent U.S. and European sanctions policies through the framework of existing and proposed Russia sanctions, and understand how the commercial space technology renaissance can aid energy infrastructure protection and sanctions policy development. The course is designed to be fast-paced, highly-active, and exciting, combining primary source readings and guest lectures from senior energy officials, executives, and experts, with classroom simulations drawing on the historical, policy, science, and technology drivers of effective energy security strategies.

1 Course Unit

TR 1:45pm-3:14pm (8/25 to 12/7)
Dr. Benjamin L. Schmitt

The aim of the course is to provide an introduction to shareholder activism. The course makes use of lectures and case studies. The lectures expose the students to the institutional and empirical facts as well as approaches followed by leading shareholder activists. The case studies are designed to provide students an experience on identifying potential opportunity for value creation through active engagement. Assignments require students to develop/practice skills on fundamental analysis.

1 Course Unit

Multiple class sections
Prof. Kevin Kaiser

This course presents law as an evolving social institution, with special emphasis on the legal regulation of business in the context of social values. It considers basic concepts of law and legal process, in the U.S. and other legal systems, and introduces the fundamentals of rigorous legal analysis. An in-depth examination of contract law is included.

1 Course Unit

Multiple class sections and instructors, see MyWharton for more information.

This course provides an introduction to environmental management by focusing on foundational concepts of environmental law and policy and how they affect business decisions. The primary aim of the course is to give students a deeper practical sense of the important relationship between business and the natural environment, the existing legal and policy framework of environmental protection, and how business managers can think about managing their relationship with both the environment and the law.

1 Course Unit

TR 8:30am-9:59am (8/25 to 12/7)
Prof. Sarah Light

This half-credit (.5 cu) course presents students with the opportunity to explore an alternative perspective to what some might consider the traditional or standard model of business. A starting point of the course is to ask whether business firms owe a “social responsibility” that includes, but goes beyond, maximizing profits. The course begins with overarching questions including to whom a business firm owes legal and ethical duties, how to balance or trade-off obligations owed to different stakeholders when they may conflict, and how to consider the distributional and other socially important implications of business decisions. Different sections of this course will examine questions about the responsibility of business toward a number of pressing environmental and social issues, including for example, climate change, fresh water availability, green marketing claims, democratic values, racial and gender diversity, human rights, poverty reduction, and global health issues such as access to medicine. These topics will be treated primarily through the lenses of law and ethics. Please consult individual instructors’ syllabi in the Wharton syllabus repository for further details on what will be covered in each individual section, and please note that topics change over time and in response to student and faculty interests. Finally, students should expect to prepare and present in groups to colleagues in classes on selected issues of business responsibility. This course fulfills the MBA Flex Core requirement in Legal Studies and Business Ethics.

0.5 Course Unit

Multiple class sections
Prof. Sarah Light

By taking Leading Across Cultural and Relational Differences, students will gain the skills, knowledge, and strategies needed to lead with empathy, authenticity, and inclusivity. The course prepares aspiring leaders to leverage the power of different perspectives and positions them as change agents capable of leading in dynamic and diverse environments. Classes will be experiential and discussion-based, providing a hands-on learning experience. Readings, self-reflection, guest lectures, case studies, and a final individual or team project will also be emphasized. Thus, by the end of this course, you should be able to:

1. Evaluate the aspects of your identity and personal experiences that shape how you interact and engage with others and lead in organizations
2. Propose ways to enhance your effectiveness as a leader in diverse environments
3. Propose ways to enhance learning and effectiveness and in an organization that is wrestling with leading across cultural and relational differences.

Multiple class sections
Prof. Stephanie Creary

This course seeks to address a gap at the core of contemporary entrepreneurship: despite a growing desire to pursue prosocial goals and affect positive change in the world, most founders have little understanding of how to measure, manage, and scale their impact. This creates the risk that financial goals will play an outsized role in decision-making, particularly as the venture scales, leading founders to drift away from social impact aims – or to pursue goals that fail to deliver on their intended impacts. MGMT 401 fulfils the Wharton capstone requirement with a hands-on approach to addressing these issues. Students will work hand-in-hand with the founding teams of pre-selected startups from the Wharton venture community to develop a strategy for measuring social impact, and ensuring fidelity to social goals as the venture goes to market and begins to scale. Projects will be group-based, and will ask students to integrate learnings on social enterprise, impact measurement, and impact investing, with prior coursework on entrepreneurship, social impact, business ethics, leadership, team dynamics, and venture finance. Students will leave the class with a deeper appreciation of the potential for business to be a force for good in the world, and the difficulties that this can pose during the founding and growth stages of a new business. The class will be of value to students who are interested in creating socially impactful businesses, as well as to those who want to work in the ecosystem that supports such ventures (e.g., consulting, or impact investing).

WH UG Capstone 

0.5 Course Unit

M 3:30pm-6:29pm (8/25 to 10/14)
Prof. Tyler Wry 

This course examines the relationships between corporate managers, the boards of directors charged with overseeing them, and investors. We’ll review the responsibilities of the board, including financial statement approval, CEO performance assessment, executive compensation, and succession planning. While boards are legally bound to represent the interests of equity investors, in the course of carrying out this role they are often called on to respond to the needs of numerous other stakeholders, including customers, employees, government and society at large. With global brands at risk and mistakes instantly transmitted via Internet and social media, the reputational stakes are very high. The course is a combination of lecture, guest lecture, discussion, case analysis and in-class research workshops. We will review some of the theory underlying modern governance practice, drawing from theories and evidence provided by research across diverse fields, including finance, sociology, and organization and management theory. We’ll study specific situations where boards and management teams faced governance challenges, and assess the strategies used to deal with them. Finally, we’ll examine the ways in which governance arrangements and external stakeholder involvement in governance affects corporate social behaviorand global citizenship.

0.5 Course Unit

Multiple class sections
Prof. Mary-Hunter McDonnell 

Environmental sustainability issues are one of the defining problems of our time. While governments and NGOs will have to play important roles, without active involvement of businesses it will be impossible to make sufficient progress on these issues. Globalization and Digitization have been two major disruptive developments that organizations have faced (and are still facing). ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) issues are the latest large-scale development that will shape companies’ futures. This course will focus on the “E” of ESG. As with any large change, environmental sustainability poses significant business challenges but also tremendous opportunities. We will study these issues both from the perspective of incumbent firms that have to adapt their business practices and from firms (incumbents and new start-ups) that will take advantage of the new opportunities that are being created.

0.5 Course Unit

W 3:30pm-6:29pm (10/19 to 12/2)

This half-semester course introduces current and future leaders to mass incarceration in the U.S., and its effect on employment and entrepreneurship prospects for formerly incarcerated people. We will explore both the challenges of our correctional system as well as potential solutions. For example, over 600,000 people return home from U.S. prisons each year. For most, the return is short-lived as two-thirds are re-incarcerated within three years of release. We will consider many of the reasons why this occurs, including research indicating that the lack of employment opportunities is a major contributor. We will also hear from those directly impacted by the justice system. By the end of the course, you will be among the more educated leaders not just on mass incarceration, but on how to think about ways that the business community can contribute to the success of those impacted by the criminal justice system. This course will also serve as a pre-requisite for a follow-up experiential course where we will teach business skills and financial acumen justice-impacted people, as well as help with their employment and entrepreneurship opportunities.

0.5 Course Unit

R 3:30-6:29pm (10/19 to 12/2)
Prof. Damon Phillips 

If you think immigration isn’t a business issue, think again. No topic is more controversial and factually misunderstood by the public, pundits, and politicians than the movement of people across borders. But in the realm of business, managers often make a serious mistake when they dismiss the topic as just “social and political context” that doesn’t directly affect the bottom line. Human migration causes the movement of four factors essential to firms: capital, talent, ideas, and consumption. Savvy firms anticipate and respond to the movement of those factors, as well as to the immigration systems created by regulators to govern the flows of those factors.

This course will help you be better prepared to deal with immigration issues as a manager, entrepreneur, investor, and citizen by covering the following interrelated themes:

• How does human mobility affect the economy, and why does it matter for firms?
• How can managers design strategies and organizations to benefit from the movement of capital, talent, ideas, and customers created by migration?
• How can entrepreneurs across sending and receiving locations capitalize on the opportunities created by constantly evolving migration dynamics?
• How do immigration systems work, and how do they affect and are affected by firms?

These issues are inescapable in our day and age. People are the ultimate resource for firms and economies, on both the supply and demand side. And people will only become increasingly scarce as fertility rates rapidly decline all around the world. The main driver of change in population dynamics, with all its ramifications for firms, will be migration. Therefore, anyone prepared for the future of the global economy must be equipped to understand the core themes of this course. As we take on those themes, we will inevitably get into all the controversial and politicized issues surrounding immigration. There will be plenty of room for debate on both sides of those issues. But we will avoid the hyperbole and hot air that characterizes most of the public debate on immigration by rooting our discussion in hard-nosed empirical evidence. You’ll see that the facts offer surprisingly clear and strong answers to many of the so-called controversies. Besides making you a better business leader, this will equip you to be a more informed and thoughtful citizen.

1 Course Unit

MW 3:30pm-4:59pm (8/24 to 12/2)
Prof. Exequiel Hernandez

This class is designed to develop world class, globally-minded managers. Many of the most important business issues of today are global in nature. Both “macro” phenomena (e.g. nationalism, protectionism, demographic change) and “micro” trends (e.g. competition within and from emerging markets, distributed talent and innovation, digitization and automation) are inherently international issues. They require firms and managers to think, innovate, and organize globally. This class offers a comprehensive set of tools to evaluate opportunities and challenges in global markets, to leverage cross-country differences to enhance innovation and performance, to manage the complexities of a business spread across multiple countries, and to win against foreign rivals. The course will focus on both the formulation and execution of global strategy, with a heavy emphasis on current events and hands on activities. Sample topics include: quantifying opportunities and risks of foreign investments; formulating and executing strategies that balance local responsiveness, global efficiency, and innovation; exploiting differences across countries to enhance innovation while protecting intellectual property; managing organizational structure, culture, and people in multinational organizations; structuring and managing cross-national and cross-cultural teams; developing a global mindset among managers and employees. This course builds on the global management portion of MGMT 611 or MGMT 612, but taking those classes is not a prerequisite for MGMT 871.

0.5 Course Unit

Multiple class sections
Prof. Exequiel Hernandez

Models are lenses. They are instruments with which we view, interpret, and give meaning to data. In this course, students will be exposed to and do work in all phases of the modeling life-cycle, including model design and specification, model construction (including data gathering and testing), extraction of information from models during post-solution analysis, and creation of studies that use modeling results to support conclusions for scientific or decision making purposes. In addition, the course will cover critical assessments of fielded models and studies using them. The course will focus broadly on models pertaining to energy and sustainability. This is not only an inherently interesting and important area, but it is very much a public one. In consequence, models, data, and studies using them are publicly and profusely available, as is excellent journalism, which facilitates introductions to specific topics. The course covers selected topics in energy and sustainability. Essential background will be presented as needed, but the course is not a comprehensive overview of energy and sustainability. Modeling in the area of energy and sustainability analytics is rife with uncertainty, and yet decisions must be made. Uncertainty, and how to deal with it in model-based decision making, is an overarching theme of the course. We will focus on energy and sustainability, but that area is hardly unique in being beset with deep and vexing uncertainties. The lessons we learn will generalize. The overall aim of the course is to teach facility with modeling and to use real-world data, models, and studies in doing so. In addition, students with interests in investment or policy analysis in the energy sphere will find the course’s subject area focus useful. OIDD 3250 is not a prerequisite for this course, but it’s helpful if you have already taken it.

1 Course Unit

TR 3:30pm-4:59pm (8/24 to 12/2)
Prof. Steven Kimbrough