English

This course is directed advanced Bachelor students as a way of learning about the role of the state economic policies (especially fiscal policies) in the economy in a manner that combines theoretical and empirical learning with practical experiences, case studies, debates and most of all much student engagement. It conveys a sound economic and policy understanding regarding the role of the state and public expenditure, including at the multilateral level. This includes theoretical and empirical concepts and extensive applications and policy discussion on the history of public spending, government “performance” and reform, fiscal sustainability and fiscal risks, financing constraints for government, and the role of fiscal rules from a comparative international perspective. It would also include three sessions on international public goods, their financing and the role of multilateral development banks (MDBs).

This course focuses on comic writing for the English stage during one of its most exuberantly creative periods. Beginning with the romantic comedy of Shakespeare and concluding with some of the most daringly sceptical drama of the Restoration period, the course explores the varieties of comic theatre developed over the 17th century, including festive comedy, the carnivalesque, fable, city comedy, and different modes of satire. In doing so, it examines the comic engagement with a range of moral, social and political debates and conflicts, both of the early modern period and in our own time. It also reads the plays in the light of theories of the purposes and workings of comedy, as well as in the context of the very different social and staging conditions obtaining at either end of the century.

This course explores this question in the context of the languages and peoples of the Danube region, focusing on German, Hungarian, Romanian, Serbian and Croatian, and Yiddish. These languages belong to two genealogically different groups (Indo-European and Uralic) and one (Yiddish) bears traces of a third group (Semitic); within Indo-European, three different sub-groups are represented (Germanic, Romance, Slavonic). The course uses data from these languages (texts in the original, idioms, proverbs, jokes, etc.) to explore language and cultural contact from both a purely linguistic perspective (language relatedness v. typological features of languages, script v. sounds, areal connections, borrowing of words, idioms, and figures of speech) and a sociolinguistic point of view (intercultural exchange, multilingualism, standardization, purism, and the relation between language and identity). It explores how Danubian languages both converge and differ, how Danubian culture is both intercultural friction and intercultural flow.

This course uses PS1001 and PS1002 as the foundation for a more advanced treatment of a number of areas in psychology. The course involves advanced treatment of the following areas of psychology: the relations between brain and behavior, cognition, perception, comparative aspects of behavior, and social and health psychology. It also contains a methodology component covering laboratory and field techniques; grounding in the methodological skills of PS2001 will be assumed.

To give students the opportunity to understand the key aspects of chemistry that are relevant to biochemistry, including the important structural implications of biologically relevant macromolecules, thermodynamics, and chemical reactions together with their reaction kinetics.

The course addresses contemporary issues facing business, through the lenses of different disciplines (ways of thinking). Disciplines may include popular culture, literature, evolutionary biology, psychology, anthropology, politics, history, religion and statistics. Students leave the course with an understanding of how to think creatively about business and how to think critically about propositions within it.

This course provides a solid foundation in corporate finance law covering three components. The first component is an introduction to corporate finance theory, which covers the nature of equity and debt as well as an introduction to how capital markets work and the theories of capital structure and valuation. The second covers the regulation of legal capital, including the relevant core accounting concepts, the regulation of dividends and share buy-backs. The third addresses the issuance of debt and equity, and related aspects of securities regulation such as insider trading and disclosure regulation, as well as mergers and acquisitions.

The course reviews the inception of present-day complex societies of West Africa, how they evolved, and their vicissitudes in the period 500 B.C. to A.D. 1950. Themes include general characteristics of West African societies in the Iron Age, origins of copper and iron technology and their effects on local societies, megalith and tumuli sites of the Western Sudan, urbanism, and trade networks and contacts in West Africa.

This course provides a fundamental overview of mathematical finance. It begins with an overview of financial contracts, interest rates, and the value of money. Specifically, it discusses what constitutes a fair price for a contract and explains why fair prices are rarely used in everyday transactions. After that, students investigate financial markets in a discrete-time setting, with the help of some revision on basic probability theory. The concept of risk-neutral asset pricing is discussed with reference to pricing stocks and options in the exchange. The last part of the course introduces the fundamental concepts of stochastic calculus and concentrates on continuous time finance with the widely used Black-Scholes model. The goal of this course is to provide students with a broad understanding of the application to finance theory, while setting a solid theoretical foundation to the field. 

Natural language Processing (NLP) is one of the most important technologies in Artificial Intelligence. NLP aims at enabling computers to understand human languages and communicate with humans. There are a large variety of tasks and machine learning methods in NLP. The course provides a thorough introduction to NLP, from its history to recent advances in deep learning applied to NLP. On the task side, we will cover sequence tagging, parsing, classification and clustering, and some applications such as machine translation. On the model side, we will cover statistical models and neural networks. By learning from lectures and programming assignments, students will master necessary knowledge about NLP and engineering tricks for practical NLP problem.