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MIT’s Golub Center’s distinguished senior fellow and former IMF official, Laura Kodres, introduces new MIT Sloan School course exploring post-crisis regulation
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"My goal is to empower the policymakers of tomorrow to make sound decisions."
Cambridge, Mass., October 8, 2019 — The MIT Sloan School of Management’s distinguished senior fellow at the Golub Center for Finance and Policy (GCFP),, will teach a new course, “Navigating Regulation in the Post-Global Crisis World,” starting this fall. The course traces the regulatory developments following the financial meltdown of 2007-08 with the goal of understanding their origin and impact.
In the aftermath of the worst global financial crisis since the Great Depression, countries around the globe passed new rules and regulations that made sweeping changes to the financial system. In the meantime, the pace of technological change has dramatically accelerated, producing a slew of new fintech products and services that pose fresh regulatory challenges.
“The financial landscape and regulatory environment have been transformed over the past decade,” says Prof. Kodres. “This course is designed to provide students with a thorough understanding of what went wrong and the main rationales for new regulation, as well as give them the tools to analyze whether or not the new rules are, in fact, mitigating risk and vulnerabilities in the system alongside the rapidly expanding use of fintech.
“My intention is for students to come away with an appreciation of the reasons for regulation while being cognizant of its limitations. Whether they end up as policymakers or in the private sector, they will need to understand the impact of regulation.”
Kodres, who was appointed distinguished senior fellow of the Golub Center in March, brings a wealth of experience and expertise to the school. She comes to MIT Sloan from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), where she was division chief for the Global Financial Stability Division in the Monetary and Capital Markets Department. She was previously employed by the U.S. Federal Reserve Board and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission as well as the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. She was also a finance professor at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan.
The seven-week course explores the new liquidity regulations and their interaction with central banks’ monetary policy role, the reincarnation of shadow banks, and the global implications of cross-border coordination in areas such as systemically important financial institutions, over-the-counter derivatives, and fintech.
The course also offers hands-on exercises that give students the opportunity to design prudential regulations in a variety of different scenarios and consider whether their solutions have the desired effect.
“I want students to get their hands dirty with real data,” says Prof. Kodres. “How do you determine which institutions in your economy are systemically important? In the event of a liquidity crisis, how can you figure out which banks would survive? And what can you do to predict the next set of risks and how they ought to be managed? My objective is to empower the policymakers of tomorrow to make sound decisions about the development and stability of the financial system.”
The course is open to a variety of students coming from the MIT Sloan School of Management, including those enrolled in the school’s Master of Finance program, upper-division undergraduates at MIT, as well as students from the Harvard Kennedy School.
The course begins October 30 and will meet on Wednesdays at 4 p.m.
