Prof. Glenn Yago | Course 55721 | Graduate School of Business Administration, Hebrew University Jerusalem
COURSE DESCRIPTION
This course will focus on the means and methods of finance applied to social, economic, and environmental challenges. Financial innovations give rise to new intermediaries, new types of instruments and new services, platforms or techniques (to create jobs, build communities, and enable capital formation and economic growth.
The course will unpack the basic procedures and application of the financial toolkit required to build capital structures to finance business and social enterprises and projects. These sessions will survey the application of innovative financing emerging through new products and services, new processes and operations and organizational forms in addressing problems as diverse as entrepreneurial finance, renewable energy, environmental finance, global health, accelerating medical solutions, regional development, affordable housing, urban revitalization and infrastructure. Students will discover why capital structure matters in aligning diverse interests into new business models for sustainable social and economic change. Students will work through problem sets for innovative financing structures for development projects and enterprises. Students will acquire and apply data gathering, economic, and financial analytical skills to identify specific market failures in developing economies enabling them to apply appropriate financial tools to bridge capital gaps for project and enterprise finance. This would include the ability to identify innovation-led growth targets (e.g., increased crop yields, reduction of disease incidence, lower credit access costs), choose a coherent, time and risk-balanced portfolio of development initiatives required to meet a measurable and tangible development target (e.g., prevention, diagnostics, treatment for global health; job creation and sustainable income and wealth formation); differentiate business, market and technological opportunities for a development target (e.g., on-grid, off-grid, and/or undergrid renewable energy); evolve, accelerate, extend and scale sustainable development business models; and identify criteria for replication (capitalizing external networks, motivate and reward repeating positive-sum economic development strategies). We will discover why capital structure matters in aligning diverse interests into new business models for social and economic change to address Sustainable Development Goals for 2030. Students will research practical applications to financing challenges for economic development.