This course aims at raising awareness and scrutiny of students to possible ethical challenges firms, managers and employees face when thinking about financial laws and regulations and their enforcement. It adopts complementary perspectives, starting from economics building blocks, followed by real-life and up-to-date examples. The scope of unethical financial behaviors covers mostly market abuses as defined by the Market Abuse Regulation, with price manipulations, insider tradings, and communication of false information (in particular accounting frauds). This course contributes to a better understanding of how ethical issues play a role in finance, and in particular in investors’ trust in finance, how ethics may conflict with firms’ strategies, and of how managers’ and employees’ decisions can impact financial markets and investors’ wealth.
The ultimate goal of this Ethics and Finance course is to prepare students to potential ethical dilemmas they might face along their careers. Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to challenge and put into perspective the financial behavior of firms (financial institutions and listed firms in particular) in terms of ethics, from an economic perspective.
Main instructor: Laure de Batz
In Fall 2024, this course was streamed to partner universities in five countries and supported by six local instructors:
Karen Petrosyan (Armenian State University of Economics in Gyumri, Armenia),
Žaneta Lacová (Matej Bel University, Slovakia),
Balázs Fazekas (University of Debrecen, Hungary),
Joanna Dzionek-Kozłowska (University of Lodz, Poland),
Ewa Stawasz-Grabowska (University of Lodz, Poland), and
Viktoriia Kyfyak (Yuriy Fedkovych Chernivtsi National University, Ukraine).
Economic theories, globally notorious cases of financial fraud, financial innovations and subsequent challenges in terms of enforcement were put into perspective and complemented by local examples. Students were introduced to the specificities of financial regulations supervision and enforcement in their respective countries. Stylized facts regarding domestic financial markets and market participants were presented, including the spillovers of financial innovations. Over 60 students successfully completed the course and were awarded the course certificate.
The literature on transition countries in this area remains limited to non-existent. Financial support from the International Visegrad Fund enabled the team of the main and local instructors to collect country specific data and case studies and develop local materials for present and future use (forthcoming).
