Finance, Corporations, and Society
Course Subject: Economics
Course Code: BUSGEN 143
Instructor: Anat Admati, Tariq Fancy
Course Quarter: Winter 2025
As society faces major challenges, democracies and “free-market” capitalism appear to be in crisis. This interdisciplinary course will explore the complex interactions between corporations, governments, and individuals, drawing on insights from the social sciences, business, and law to understand how institutions and collective actions translate to a set of rules and to outcomes for people and nature. The course aims to help students become savvier in their interactions with our economic and political systems and understand the governance issues that are critical to whether and how well institutions in the private and public sectors serve us.
Topics include financial decisions, financial markets, banks and institutional investors; corporations and corporate governance; political economy and the rule of law as it applies to people and to organizations, and the role and functioning of the media. We will connect the material to specific issues such as climate change and justice, and discuss current events regularly throughout the course. Students will have the opportunity to explore a situation of their choosing in more depth through group final projects. Visitors with relevant experiences will regularly enrich our class discussion.
This course is pre-approved to count toward specific majors, including Human Environmental Systems, Public Policy, Political Science, and ECON, and may be petitioned to count toward specific majors, including MS&E.
Anat R. Admati
Anat R. Admati is the George G.C. Parker Professor of Finance and Economics at Stanford Graduate School of Business and a senior fellow at Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. Her disciplinary interests lie in the interaction of business, law and policy, and specifically governance and accountability mechanisms in the private sector and in government. Admati is also Faculty Director of the Corporations and Society Initiative at Stanford GSB, whose mission is to raise awareness and increase understanding of the complex interactions among people, corporations and governments.
Tariq Fancy
Tariq Fancy is a successful investor, turnaround specialist, and entrepreneur, and has a unique perspective and voice on a critical challenge for global capitalism today: how to merge sustainability and social imperatives with traditional business models focused purely on profit.