WHAT IS THE SPLIT BETWEEN COURSES TAUGHT BY RESEARCHERS AND COURSES TAUGHT BY PRACTITIONERS?
The norm is to have applied courses taught later in the program by practitioners who use the concepts seen in the Fall with researchers. For instance, the course on derivatives and foreign exchange markets taught by Loic Henry uses concepts seen in the courses of introduction to finance, financial maths, arbitrage theory and international macroeconomics (which replaces the course “indicators for managers”). As a consequence, a majority of courses taught in the January-April period are taught by practitioners. There are exceptions though: the HEC MS Finance also offers a few “high-tech” electives taught by world-class expert researchers in their field. This is for instance the case of the electives on volatility modelling (Laurent Calvet), advanced asset pricing (Nizar Touzi) or liquidity of financial markets (Thierry Foucault). The flexibility of our elective system allows each student to choose the proportion of courses he or she takes that are taught by researchers vs. practitioners.
