Tuck’s integrated core curriculum provides rigorous coverage of key functional areas and disciplines: statistics and decision science, corporate finance and capital markets, managerial and global economics, marketing, organizational behavior and personal leadership, strategy, communications, and operations. The courses are carefully integrated and build on and complement each other. Students who have extensive background in a discipline may opt out of a course and take an elective course in its place.
Analysis for General Managers
This minicourse focuses on general management—what it is, what it means for people and organizations, why it's important, and how it affects the identification of key problems and opportunities that help define whether companies will be winners or losers. The module has three primary goals: to introduce the notion of a general management perspective, foster understanding of the general manager's job, and develop analytical skills for effective problem solving and opportunity identification.
Capital Markets
Managers in any corporate function should understand the pricing of stocks and bonds. This course examines the complex interrelationships among equity and fixed income markets. Topics include the cost of money (interest rates) in bond markets; how stocks and bonds should be priced and why prices are sometimes not realized because of institutional factors or market inefficiencies; the optimal construction of portfolios of investments, emphasizing the trade-off between risk and return in great detail; and the pricing and uses of derivative assets such as futures and options and how they may be used to control financial risk in corporations.
Competitive and Corporate Strategy
This course is concerned with the formulation of business strategy and its implementation. Strategy is concerned with answering two central questions: what businesses should we participate in? and how should we compete? Managing the enterprise in a way that facilitates arriving at and implementing the best answers to these questions is referred to as strategic management. In this course, students learn concepts and frameworks that are useful for analyzing and formulating business strategies. Students also develop skills for identifying managerial issues, finding alternative ways to deal with those issues, and evaluating alternative plans of action. Finally, students learn specific analytical techniques for diagnosing the competitive position of a business, evaluating business strategies, and identifying and analyzing specific business options.
Corporate Finance
This course discusses basic principles of corporate finance and provides practical tools for financial decisions and valuation. The course consists of five sections. 1) Capital Budgeting Decisions shows optimal project acceptance criteria consistent with the objective of maximizing the market value of the firm. 2) Estimating the Cost of Capital extends the analysis from the Capital Markets course to the practice of estimating a project's expected return. 3) Valuation Techniques develops several valuation methods used in practice, including WACC, APV, multiples, and real options. 4) Capital Structure and Dividend Policies involves a discussion of how capital structure and dividend decisions affect firm value and survey industry practice. 5) Investment Banking develops key principles and practices for raising capital, mergers and acquisitions, and modern restructuring techniques.
Decision Science
This course introduces the basic concepts of model building and encourages students to take an analytic view of decision making. The electronic spreadsheet is used as the principal device for building models, and the course covers the concepts of effective spreadsheet design and use. With that background, students acquire knowledge about specific management science techniques, such as optimization and simulation, and the student builds spreadsheet models to identify choices, formalize trade-offs, specify constraints, perform sensitivity analyses, and analyze the impact of uncertainty.
Financial Measurement, Analysis, and Reporting
This course develops the basic concepts and procedures underlying corporate financial statements and introduces tools for analyzing profitability and risk. We explore the impact of the alternatives available within generally accepted accounting principles on financial statements, especially in terms of management's financial reporting strategy.