A new online resource for faculty interested in teaching finance and sustainability has been created by WDI’s Educational Outreach (EO).
The resources include materials used in Professor Gautam Kaul’s “Finance and the Sustainable Enterprise” course at Michigan’s Ross School of Business. Teaching cases and notes, the course syllabus, commentary on class sessions, and a community forum all can be found online at
GlobaLens, EO’s website that serves as an aggregator and distributor for international business teaching materials.
Also, Moses Lee, a research associate at EO, is keeping a blog on the course and will work with Kaul to develop new knowledge pieces to help advance the field. Here is a
YouTube video of Kaul discussing his course.
Access to the resources, however, is limited to those educators registered with GlobaLens.
Kaul, the John C. and Sally S. Morley Professor of Finance at Ross, has already been taught five times at Michigan and has received rave reviews. He has been at the school since 1984 and received his Ph.D in economics from the University of Chicago. He recently won the MBA Teaching Excellence Award at the Ross School of Business.
In the course, Kaul said students address the financial and valuation issues from the perspective of a typical firm, whose objective is to maximize shareholder value, but recognize and confront a whole slew of environmental issues with dire real effects. Students will critically evaluate the viability of the assumptions and institutions necessary to ensure the success of any modern firm in achieving its objective of maximizing shareholder, without adversely affecting broader economic and societal values. More importantly, they will modify existing economic and financial frameworks in an attempt to evaluate the effects of new and emerging regulatory and strategic environmental issues on the value of projects and firms.
The course’s mission is to make students realize that “business as usual,” at least as it has been known for the past several decades, cannot lead to a sustainable world. Students hopefully will also emerge through this experience equipped with a framework and a set of tools that can help them create and manage businesses that can deal with the complex and uncertain world confronting us today. Ultimately, the goal is to evaluate not only the private benefit, but also the social value, created or destroyed by a project and therefore the firm.
“The course is unique in that it looks at the issue of environmental and social sustainability through an economics and finance perspective,” Lee said.
Lee recently sat in on a webinar hosted by the Aspen Institute entitled “Sustainability Trends in MBA Education.”
“The seminar was rich in insights and highlighted the increasing demands by business students and faculty for coursework on the topic of environmental sustainability and social impact,” Lee said. “One of the challenges in launching sustainability electives or adding sustainability modules to existing courses in business schools, however, is a lack of available teaching materials or well developed pedagogical tools and frameworks.”
The new resources on GlobaLens, Lee said, will help in addressing the “market failure.”