Business and Management

Professorial lectures

Each year, the University presents a series of public lectures featuring Sussex academics and guest speakers, including members of faculty in the Department of Business and Management.

For more information, see The Sussex Lectures.

Professor Carol AlexanderProf Carol Alexander

Financial Market Volatility

21 May 2014
Speaker: Carol Alexander, Professor of Finance

Volatility is the defining characteristic of efficient markets: prices move in random ways, and so no one can make a certain profit. Yet randomness can be described, measured and forecast. Financial market volatility is the essential driver of trading and a fundamental determinant of risk – in the financial system as well as the wider global economy. This lecture will document and explore Professor Alexander’s research into volatility, from guiding the first statistical models implemented by London banks, to the ‘risk-neutral’ world of volatility implied by the prices of financial options listed on exchanges.

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Prof David StoreyProf David Storey

What actually happens to new businesses?

14 May 2013
Speaker: David Storey, Professor of Enterprise

Approximately one percent of new enterprises have sales of more than £1 million six years after they start. More typically, the median sales of a six year old firm is less than £23,000. This lecture will consider and attempt to assess why so many people believe enterprise and entrepreneurship is vital to pulling Britain out of a recession.

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Prof Roger Strange

Outsourcing, offshoring and the global factory

13 March 2012
Speaker: Roger Strange, Professor of International Business

Thirty years ago, the advanced economies of North America, Western Europe and Japan accounted for a large percentage of world GDP, trade and foreign direct investment. In 2012, an increasing proportion of global economic activity is taking place in the emerging economies. The causes of this seismic shift are well documented, but who owns and controls this ‘global factory’?

This lecture will look at the possibility that firms from the advanced economies have offshored many of their value chain activities to the emerging economies, which has possibly been accompanied by an outsourcing (externalisation) of some of the value chain activities to independent suppliers. Such externalisation involves not only a physical ‘slicing-up’ of the value chain and a change in its ownership, but often control still resides with the ‘lead’ firm. The ‘global factory’ concept is very much a reality, notwithstanding the absence of central ownership. Professor Strange will ask what the reasons are for the growth of outsourcing over the past 30 years and consider implications of this trend.

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