UAB and Lingnan University, Hong Kong, to offer double master's degree in Economics
The Rector of the UAB, Ferran Sancho, and the President of Lingnan University, Leonard K. Cheng, have signed an agreement to offer a double master's degree combining the Master's Degree in Economic Analysis (IDEA) and the Master of Science in International Banking and Finance (MIBF), taught in Hong Kong and the UAB.
This double degree is aimed at students interested in international banking and finance, combining the solid analytic training of the Master's Degree in Economic Analysis of the UAB's Faculty of Economics and Business Studies with the specialist preparation provided by the MIBF, which trains up professionals to work in international financial corporations, and has a particularly high success rate in the Hong Kong employment market. Graduates from this programme will not only have two master's degrees (one in Economic Analysis from the UAB and one in International Banking and Finance from Lingnan), but also a chance to join the IDEA doctoral programme, which is run by the UAB in collaboration with the Barcelona Graduate School of Economics.
The Master's Degree in Economic Analysis (IDEA) is a research degree that prepares its students for academic careers and for positions in the private sector and in government and non-government organisations. It provides a solid grounding in Economics, with the accent placed on rigorous analytic thinking and advanced quantitative and computational methods. Its wide range of specialisation options makes its students more competitive in the labour market and helps them to acquire the knowledge needed to move on into doctoral studies. This master's degree has obtained the new distinction of International Master's Programme (IMP), awarded by the Government of Catalonia (Generalitat), and recently the evaluation board of the Quality Assurance Agency for the University System in Catalonia (AQU) recommended it for "Accreditation with Quality. Furthermore, the subject area that this degree belongs to was placed in the 51–100 segment in the fourth edition of the QS World University Rankings by Subject.
The new double programme will allow students to combine the analytic training in Economics of the IDEA master's degree with the specialist preparation provided by the MIBF, whose syllabus concentrates on banking and finance, while also encompassing compatibility and regulation, and which has close ties with the financial markets. The programme combines theory and practice and addresses both the local and the international context. Its students can make use of both universities' employability and career services.
The syllabus comprises the 120 ECTS credits of the IDEA programme and 30 credits corresponding to the MIBF. During the first year, at the UAB, the students will receive training in optimisation, probability and statistics, game theory, microeconomics and macroeconomics, econometrics and MATLAB. The second year starts off with a semester in Hong Kong in which they will take five courses from four subject areas: corporate finance, international, investment and financial institutions. In the final semester, back at the UAB, they will work on their master's dissertation and take courses in empirical finance, markets, money and banking, macroeconometrics, networks, applied public economics and experimental economics.
In addition, through the UAB's Language Service, they will have the opportunity to learn foreign languages during the winter and summer breaks.
This double degree is open both to students already on the IDEA master's programme and to those starting next year.
Lingnan University
Lingnan University is the public liberal arts university of Hong Kong. It is a university engaged in teaching, research and knowledge transfer, with a powerful international projection thanks to its emphasis on proficiency in English, together with Chinese. It was recently classified by Forbes as one of the ten best liberal arts universities in Asia, and in the Academic Ranking of World Universities (Shanghai Rankings) it is placed in the 151–200 segment of the world's best universities in economics and business studies.