Governing Firms and Financial Markets
S06
Geoffrey Pigman
When large North American and European firms like Enron, WorldCom, Global Crossing, and Parmalat were engulfed in financial scandals in recent years, thousands of workers lost their jobs, retirees lost their pensions, and many investors lost substantial portions of their accumulated capital. Following on the “dotcom boom” and “go-go” business culture of the 1990s, the scandals led publics on both sides of the Atlantic to question how firms do business and how financial markets, which businesses rely upon to raise capital and to operate.

This course investigates how societies and polities create and structure a market economy. How do we make and enforce the rules that businesses and financial institutions must follow? What happens when things go wrong? What are the politics of market regulation? In considering these questions, we shall learn about the basic processes of investment research, sales, and trading, using a generally nonquantitative approach.