Elective Courses

Significantly growing numbers of PRC companies are expanding into western markets. Multinational corporations are also eager to invest in China. Hong Kong is a location commonly used for these inbound and outbound investments. International tax planning with a China focus and using Hong Kong as a platform are important topics in the business world. This course aims to impart to students an understanding of global tax planning considerations and strategies, including the China Tax for relevant tax planning techniques. An effective global tax plan can minimize a corporate group’s overall tax liabilities, thereby maximizing its global group profits.

This course introduces the basic topics of management. It provides the students with an understanding of what the job of a manager involves. In addition to covering the basic theoretical concepts, the course also allows the students to have some hands-on practice as an effective manager. Furthermore, this course has a strong emphasis on learning through real world examples. Upon finishing this course, students should have a solid understanding of (a) the contemporary issues faced by most managers today, and (b) the roles managers play in the process of attaining organizational goals.

This course introduces corporate finance topics, including capital budgeting techniques and financial and risk management. It identifies and provides a framework for analyzing the major financial decisions made by a firm. Issues addressed include asset valuation models, investment decision making, analysis of risk, financial planning, dividend policy, working capital management, sources of long-term finances and the cost of capital, and the financial mix for the firm.

The course is designed to equip students a blend of technical accounting, ethical and professional management skills required by effective business leaders.  Moreover, the course not only covers traditional business and accounting disciplines, such as, leadership, strategic planning and analysis, corporate governance, auditing, accounting control and risk management, but also some increasingly important management issues, like corporate social responsibility, professional ethics, data analytics and use of e-business applications.  All these topics are to be discussed intensively to make this course to be practical and realistic for our future accountants.

The ability to store, retrieve, and manipulate data using modern database systems is essential to the success of data analytics. Besides relational databases that have been widely used in transactional systems and dimensional databases that have been the core of data warehouses, non-relational databases have also gained much popularity nowadays because of their flexibility to handle semi-structured and unstructured data. This course aims to introduce the fundamental principles of the design, development, and administration of various database models. Students will learn the basic concepts involved in the design and management of relational databases, dimensional databases, and NoSQL databases.

This course aims to enhance students’ awareness to earnings management and financial statement frauds, introduce students to the fundamental concepts in forensic accounting, promote detections and preventions of earnings management and frauds in financial statements. Students will gain the concepts and applications of the course content through a variety of teaching and learning materials and activities, including and not limit to book chapters, articles, slides, videos, cases, presentations, discussions, and other interactive lecture activities.

This course is designed to help students develop strategies to create and extract value from applying social media analytics.  Techniques covered will include web scraping, data management, machine learning, social network analytics, text analytics, natural language processing, sentiment analysis, and knowledge mining.  Students will also learn how to carry out a business analytics project from beginning to end.

The course aims to examine questions on different aspects of a modern full-service bank, including how it makes profit in each of the main business areas, as well as the main risks that it faces and how it manages those risks.  The course focuses on financial statement analysis and also analyzing the accounting and disclosure rules for financial instruments, in order to reveal the strategies followed by the bank given the various regulations under which it operates.

You can take up to two electives from the Master of Economics, Master of Finance, Master of Finance in Financial Technology, Master of Global Management, Master of Science in Business Analytics or Master of Science in Marketing programme at HKU. Enrollment in electives from other programmes is subject to seat availability and approval by the Programme Directors concerned based on your profile, capabilities and performance in the MAcct programme.

Since enrollment in other taught postgraduate electives is not guaranteed, you should always choose four MAcct electives during the course enrollment in our programme. Course enrollment results of other programmes may only be confirmed after that course has started. If your enrollment is successful, you can drop the MAcct elective(s) and enroll in the other taught postgraduate elective(s).

It is your responsibility to make sure you obtain 72 credits to fulfill the graduation requirements and there is no overlapping of classes and exams in courses from different programmes.

*The list of available electives from other programmes may have prerequisite requirement(s) and is subject to change for future intakes.