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Rotman PhD Courses

PhD course listing

View the 2023-2024 PhD Course Schedule

Please view the Course Schedule above for the current 2023-2024 course schedule.  

PhD Course Listing

(In some cases course outlines from previous years are provided as a reference)

 

RSM3001 Research Methods in Strategic Management
Winter 2018
M 10am - 1pm, Location:7024

View 2016-2017 Course Outline 

View 2015-2016 Course Outline

Instructor
Joel Baum

Course Scope and Mission

This course is designed for doctoral students who wish to understand and publish research in scholarly journals in strategic management and organization theory. The course is organized in terms of stages in the research process beginning with how to frame research questions and the merits of alternative research methods, covering topics and providing examples in areas such as experimental design, survey design, ethnography, case studies, and archival research. By the end of the course, students will be prepared to critically evaluate research method and design choices for their own research and move on to courses in specific research techniques.

RSM3002 Strategy and Organizations: Introduction to Organization Theory
Fall 2018
F 9am-12pm, Location: 7024

Instructor
Anne Bowers

Course Overview and Objectives

The goal of this doctoral course is to familiarize students with major conceptual frameworks, debates, and developments in contemporary organization theory. This is an inter-disciplinary domain of inquiry drawing primarily from sociology, and secondarily from economics, psychology, anthropology, and political science. It seeks to understand intra- and inter-organizational processes, as well as the relationships between organizations and the cultural context in which they are located. This is an introduction to a vast and multifaceted domain of inquiry. Due to time limitations, this course will touch lightly on many important topics, and neglect others entirely; its design resembles more a map than an encyclopedia. Also, given the focus on theoretical matters, methodological issues will move to the background. Empirical material will be used to illustrate how knowledge is produced from a particular standpoint and trying to answer particular questions, leaving the bulk of the discussion on quantitative and qualitative procedures to your methods courses. Further, some topics that might be naturally covered in this syllabus will be omitted
because they are the subject of other courses (“Strategy and Economics” for organizational economics; “Economic Sociology” for institutional theory, social networks, social capital and embeddedness) you will take during your doctoral training.

RSM3003 Strategy & Economics
Not offered in 2018-2019

View 2017-2018 Course Outline

View 2015-2016 Course Outline

Course Scope and Mission

The course emphasizes both seminal research and recent developments in the application of economics to strategic management. We will explore theoretical analyses and empirical studies that address fundamental questions in strategy research:  What are the sources of differential firm performance? What are the appropriate boundaries of the firm? What drives innovation in industries? How does market design relate to strategic management?

The overarching objectives of the course are:

  • To explore the theoretical foundations of alternative models of strategic management;
  • To be able to model phenomenon in an empirically relevant manner;
  • To integrate lines of thought across strategic management, the economics of innovation, the theory of the firm and organizational economics.

Instructor

Alberto Galasso

RSM3005 Strategy Seminar
Fall/Winter 2018 - 2019
T 1pm - 4pm (Fall), T 10am -1pm (Winter), Location: 7024

Instructor

Bill McEvily

RSM3010 Special Topics in the Economics of Technology and Innovation
Time: TBA, Location: TBA

RSM3011 Advanced Topics in the Theory of Industrial Organization
Winter 2018
Time: TBA, Location:TBA

View 2016-2017 Course Outline 

View 2015-2016 Course Outline

Course Scope and Mission

This course has two objectives: i) to introduce students to the game-theoretic models that are the foundation of the modern theory of firm behavior and ii) to take students to the frontier of Industrial Organization Theory by introducing them to the latest research in the Field. The ultimate goal of the course is to help students develop research topics that will form the basis of their PhD thesis research.

Instructor

Heski Bar-Isaac

RSM3012 Advanced Topics in Urban and Real Estate Economics
Not offered in 2018-2019

View 2017-2018 Course Outline 

Course Scope and Mission

This course is primarily aimed at PhD students who have completed the first year of a PhD program in Economics or a related field. Second year MA students are also welcome to consider the course, but should discuss with me before registering.

The course covers the following topics: land use theory, demand estimation and hedonic methods, urban transportation, sorting across political jurisdictions, applied econometric methods for spatial data, and housing and real estate. After taking the course, students will have an understanding of standard urban theory and modern empirical methods plus an overview of empirical evidence on various important applied urban topics. In addition, students will develop an understanding of how to manipulate and analyze spatial data sets. This course will prepare students with many of the necessary tools to undertake their own research in urban and real estate economics or related fields. The material in this course is designed to complement the material in Michel Serafinelli’s graduate Urban and Regional Economics course.

Instructor

Nathaniel Baum Snow

RSM3020 Introduction to Empirical Research in Accounting
Fall 2018
T 3pm - 6pm, Location: RTN 570

Instructor

Ole-Kristian Hope

RSM3021 Managerial Accounting Seminar
Fall 2018
F 9am - 11am,  Location: RTN 570

Instructor

Jeff Callen

RSM3029 Selected Topics in Financial Accounting Research
Winter 2019
M,F 2pm-4pm, Location:RTN 570

RSM3030 Financial Theory I
Fall 2018
T 1pm - 5pm, Location: RTN 470

View 2016-2017 Course Outline 

Course Description

This course is an introductory PhD level course on the basic theories of asset pricing. It consists of four parts. The first part deals with individual choices under uncertainty, including expected utility theory, risk aversion, stochastic dominance, and two-period consumption portfolio problems. The second part deals with equilibrium pricing theories, including implications of no arbitrage and stochastic discount factor, risk sharing, aggregation, and consumption-based pricing in complete markets, mean-variance efficiency and the Capital Asset Pricing Model, and the Arbitrage Pricing Theory. We also explore the relation between these various pricing theories and extend the treatment of individual consumption/portfolio problems and equilibrium pricing to a multi-period setting. In the third part, we review recent developments in asset pricing by introducing some stylized facts and new theories. The fourth part provides a brief introduction to asymmetric information in financial markets.

Instructor

Liyan Yang

RSM3031 Research Topics in Asset Pricing
Winter 2019
T 4pm - 6:30pm, Location: RTN 470

Instructor

Redouane Elkamhi

RSM3032 Corporate Finance I / Empirical Methods
Fall 2018
F 3pm - 6pm, Location: RTN 470

View 2017-2018 Course Outline

View 2016-2017 Course Outline

View 2015-2016 Course Outline

Course Scope and Mission

This course is intended to (1) introduce students to a number of substantive and, in some cases, specialized topics in the broadly defined area of empirical research in finance; and (2) familiarize students with the connections among the theory underlying the research, the nature of the research question addressed, and the method used to address the research question. Topics to be covered include financial assets returns characteristics, GMM estimation and applications, predictability of financial assets returns, tests of market efficiency, and empirical tests of asset pricing models. There is an extensive reading list of published and unpublished research papers.

Instructor

Pat Akey

RSM3033 Current Topics in Finance
Winter 2019
Time: TBA, Location:TBA

View 2015-2016 Course Outline

Instructor

Alexander Dyck, Sergei Davydenko

Course Description

This is an advanced course in corporate finance. It will introduce you to the main issues in corporate finance, identify principle theoretical tools and empirical approaches, force you to read and understand the "greatest hits" in the field, and foster your thinking about current research questions. The objective is to prepare students to critically evaluate and conduct research in corporate finance.

RSM3034 Empirical Asset Pricing
Winter 2019
Time:TBA, Location: TBA

RSM 3045: Advanced Topics in Operations Management: Location Analysis
Not offered in 2018-2019

RSM3046 Advanced Topis in Operations Management 
Winter 2019
M 10am-12pm, Location: RTN 470

Instructor

Opher Baron

RSM3051 Marketing Theory I: Consumer Behaviour
Fall 2018
F 1pm - 4pm, Location:TBA

View 2017-2018 Course Outline

View 2016-2017 Course Outline 

Course Scope and Mission 

The purpose of the class is to discuss the major marketing journals, the review process,the relationship between academic marketing and marketing practice and what is required to achieve academic success.

We will also discuss different perspectives on consumer behaviour. The readings provide background of two different approaches to consumer behaviour, social psychology and behavioural economics, and an overview of current research in consumer behaviour.

Instructor

Pankaj Aggarwal

RSM3052 Marketing Theory II: Strategy
Winter 2019
T 9am - 12pm, Location: RTN 570

Instructor

Avi Goldfarb

RSM3055 Econometric Methods in Marketing
Winter 2019
W 1pm-4pm, Location: RTN 570

View 2016-2017 Course Outline

View 2015-2016 Course Outline

Course Description

This course focuses on recent developments in quantitative marketing and empirical industrial organization, with an emphasis on dynamic structural models.  We will study techniques for developing and estimating models of demand and competition in both static and dynamic settings.  In these types of models, an economic agent’s decision today can have an impact on how he and other players make their decisions in the future.  In many situations, economic agents recognize this relationship and make strategic choices.  Examples of dynamic demand models include consumer learning models, inventory and stockpiling problems, durable goods adoption and replacement decisions.  Examples of dynamic competition models include dynamic price competition, entry-exit, store location and product positioning.  We will emphasize the importance of combining theory, institutional details and econometric techniques to answer these types of questions in marketing, industrial organization and other applied microeconomics areas.  By discussing several empirical applications in detail, we will illustrate how to apply basic modeling techniques to problems at hand.  There is no text.  The course will be a mixture of lecture notes and discussion of specific papers.

Instructor

Matthew Osborne

RSM3056 Current Topics in Marketing Strategy
Fall 2018
W 2pm - 5pm,  Location: RTN 570

View 2017-2018 Course Outline

View 2016-2017 Course Outline 

Instructor

David Soberman

Course Description

This course builds on RSM 3052, and its aim is to expose students to the frontiers of research in theoretical/empirical marketing strategy so that you can start to think about a dissertation topic.  Generally, we will examine papers of recent vintage, some still in working paper form, to expose you to current developments in the field. The aim of the course is to prepare you for a career in research and most immediately in terms of producing a second-year research paper. At least one class per student will be reserved for discussion of his/her second-year paper.

RSM3058 The Psychology of Judgement and Decision Making
Fall 2018
TH 10am-1pm, Location: RTN 570

RSM3060 Human Resource Management
Fall 2018
M 1pm-4pm, Location: RTS 6024

Instructor

Gary Latham

RSM3062 Methods & Research in Organizational Behaviour
Winter 2019
M 10am-1pm, Location: TBA

Instructor

Brian Connelly

RSM3064 Organizational  Behaviour
Not offered in 2018-2019

Instructor

Katy DeCelles

RSM3065 Meso Organizational Behaviour Seminar
Fall 2020
T 1pm-4pm, Location: online

RSM3080 Research Methods in Business
Fall/Winter 2018-2019
Time: TBA, Location: TBA

View 2016-2017 Course Outline

View 2015-2016 Course Outline

Instructor

Stéphane Côté

Course Scope and Mission

Besides a firm grounding in their core discipline, PhD students in management also benefit from awareness of the multidisciplinary character of research in management, and connections to standards of scientific inquiry across the disciplines. First, this course seeks to complement students’ disciplinary training by providing some basic aspects of the philosophy of science underlying all scholarly research in the management disciplines. Second, it seeks to expose students to the variety of research questions and research methodologies across the topic areas that dominate research and teaching at schools of management.

Course Format

The course will have three basic components:

a. A workshop delivered by Professor Anita McGahan focused on research methods.
b. A series of visits to regularly scheduled area research workshops, each followed by a debriefing session. The goal is to schedule these roughly once per month.
c. A workshop in which PhD students from each area identify and evaluate the character of major research questions in their management discipline.

RSM3090 Advanced Topics in Opertations Management: Matching Markets
Fall 2018
T 3pm - 5pm, Location: RTN 470

RSM3090 Advanced Topics in Management Science 2: Modeling Interactions on Networks
Winter 2021
T 3pm-5pm, Location: Zoom

RSM3090 Models & Methods in Strategic Management
Winter 2019
T 2pm - 5pm, Location: RTS 7024

2016-2017 Course Outline pending

View 2015-2016 Course Outline

Course Objectives

This course introduces a “toolkit” of methods for attempting to estimate causal relationships using field data. We will discuss how to establish what relationships exist in the data, when you can interpret these relationships as causal, and how you can convince your audience of your results (without overselling).

Because methods aren’t too useful without interesting questions to answer, we will also spend time developing our “taste” for what constitutes a quality empirical research paper.  The ultimate goal is for you leave prepared to undertake your own empirical research.

We will also think carefully about the interaction between large-sample empirical research, qualitative institutional data, and theory, especially the importance of careful theoretical thinking (in the context of the institutional details) for empirical research.

Preparation and Prerequisites

This course is designed to complement a graduate sequence in econometrics, but it should be accessible to students with basic knowledge of statistics and probability. We will focus on intuition and understanding how statistical models relate to the underlying data (and theory). Still, there will be technical material in readings, discussions, and assignments.  Talk to Prof. Hoffman if you have any questions about whether or not this class is for you.

Instructor

Mitch Hoffman

RSM3091 Social Cognition
Winter 2019
M 3pm - 5pm, Location: 570

Instructor

Wil Cunningham

RSM3091 Innovation and Technology
Winter 2019
F 12:30pm - 3:30pm, Location: RTS 7024

Instructor

Shannon Liu

RSM3091 Research Topics Finance
Fall 2018
Time: TBA, Location:TBA

RSM3090 Special Topics: Experimental Economics
Fall 2018
M 10am - 1pm, Location: RTN 570

View 2017-2018 Course Outline

View 2015-2016 Course Outline

Instructor

Tanjim Hossain

Overview and Objectives

Incentivized laboratory and field experiments have become a major area of research in economics and it is slowly emerging as a very useful tool in quantitative marketing. Its basic premise is that all good economic theories can be testable in a controlled laboratory or field setting. In fact, one may argue that some economic theories (e.g., theories of refinement in games) can only be tested experimentally. This course surveys some classics of experimental economics and discusses some of its recent developments. We will initially focus on laboratory experiments and then move on to field experiments. The objective of this course is to be able to design good economic experiments.

RSM3091 OBHRM Workshop
Fall/Winter 2018-2019
W 2pm - 4pm, Location:6024

View 2017-2018 Course Outline

View 2015-2016 Course Outline

Course Objective

This course seeks to provide a forum in which to learn the process of doing research.  The goal of this course is to improve your skills in the consumption and production of academic scholarship.

In the invited seminar series you will have the opportunity to hear and network with speakers from a wide variety of universities presenting work on diverse topics.

The workshop will provide a more hands-on opportunity for participants to hone their research skills by presenting their own research and by providing feedback to others.

The course runs in two parts: the seminar series and the class workshop.

Instructor

Marlys Christianson

RSM3091 Economic Sociology & Strategy
Not offered in 2018-2019

View 2015-2016 Course Outline

Instructor

Laura Doering

Course Overview

The goal of this course is to expose students to some of the most important theoretical paradigms and empirical findings in the field of economic sociology, a vibrant area of research that applies a distinct sociological perspective to economic phenomena. The course focuses on core themes in economic sociology and also considers their relevance for strategic management research. Some of economic sociology’s insights deeply permeate contemporary strategy scholarship and remain highly influential; other ideas from the field have received less attention from strategy scholars and thus represent important opportunities for enriching strategic management research.