English

The course looks at financial institutions, including central banks, commercial banks, broker-dealers, money market funds, and hedge funds, as well as financial markets and their infrastructures. Students analyze the underlying business models as well as the legal and regulatory environment in which these institutions and markets operate. It also focuses on financial products, with a particular emphasis on money and money-like financial instruments. This includes the basics of finance theory, monetary theory, the money creation process, but also derivatives and repurchase transaction and the role they play in the modern economy.

This introductory course deals with changes in our physical and biological environment on a variety of timescales, looks into the causes of natural environmental change and examines the progressive environmental impact of people from the last glacial stage up to the present. This course aims to place present-day environmental issues such as climate change, evolution, biodiversity and human-environment interactions in a long-term temporal perspective, arguing that an understanding of the present and prediction of the future both require an examination of the past.

This course covers Ancient Israel from its cradle to the beginning of the common era, ending with Qumran. It covers the theories about the origins of Israel, including the exodus from Egypt, against the socio-political background of Ancient Israel with due attention to historiography. The succession and successes of various royals are covered, as well as the activity of the prophets in a comparative perspective. Cultic practices throughout the period are discussed.

This course investigates Roman politics through the lens of classical political theory, applying ideas about liberty, citizenship, equality, and form of government to the real political practices of the Romans of the first century BC. The course commences with a survey of the everyday political environment of first-century Rome, which provides the context for an in-depth analysis of republican ideology. The course then explores the political thought of influential ancient authors such as Plato, Aristotle, Polybius, and Cicero, before examining the ways in which the image of the Roman Republic and its associated political ideology have been constructed and applied in political theory across the centuries, tracing their metamorphosis in the writings of Machiavelli, 17th-century English republicans, the defenders of the American constitution, and the French Enlightenment.

Artificial intelligence is the technology that is commonly recognized to have profound impact to the economy and every aspect of human life. This course will focus on exploring how AI affects various aspects of the economy. We will focus on discussing the effects of AI on macroeconomics, labor market, education, as well as how AI combined with big data will transform business strategy, including issues such as individualized recommendation system, market design, data trading, etc. We will also discuss more fundamental ethnical issues such as privacy concern, algorithm discrimination, inequality and welfare. We will then have a better understanding of government policy regarding the AI technology.

More than half of the world's population today live in urban areas, and this share is expected to increase. Modern cities are highly complex political and economic systems. But with the complexity also comes the challenge of how to organize them well. This course applies concepts and theories across philosophy, politics, and economics to the challenges of urban living. The course is divided into two parts. The first part will introduce students to the key theoretical debates relevant to the socio-political organization of the city. Students investigate whether living in the city is qualitatively different to living elsewhere. During the second part of the course, students apply this theoretical knowledge to concrete problems and case studies: urban informality, sanctuary cities, housing, residential segregation and proposals for urban independence.  

Psycholinguistics tests different theories of the production, perception, and acquisition of language by using various methods, such as reaction time experiments, brain activity measurements, misarticulation analysis, and corpus analysis. This course provides an introduction to these theories and methods. Furthermore, the factors that affect our perception, production, and acquisition of a first or second language are studied. The course introduces the principles for conducting and assessing a psycholinguistic experiment and includes an exercise in conducting such an experiment.

This course is an introduction to problem-solving, algorithm development, and programming in the Python language. It includes fundamental programming constructs and abstractions, sorting and searching techniques, and machine representations of data. The practical component covers input/output, conditionals, loops, strings, functions, arrays, lists, dictionaries, recursion, text files, and exceptions in Python. Students are taught testing and debugging, as well as sorting and searching algorithms, algorithm complexity, and equivalence classes. Number systems, binary arithmetic, Boolean algebra, and logic gates are also introduced. The course is offered in a blended learning format. 

This course explores the contributions made by economic theory to several important economic problems. While the list of topics is generally quite flexible, the underlying theme is the use of game theoretic modelling and the use of mathematical modelling and equilibrium concepts developed in economic theory. There are no formal prerequisites, but the course is quite technical and students with weak quantitative background should be willing to catch up with constrained optimization (e.g., Lagrange & Kuhn-Tucker methods) and intermediate microeconomics (e.g., competitive markets vs monopolies).

This course provides the necessary knowledge and skills to enable a student to understand the nature and characteristics of financial planning in the context of entrepreneurship. This involves the understanding of the key financial statements (profit & loss, balance sheet and cash flow), the financial planning process, the financial risks/rewards of entrepreneurship and innovation, new venture financial models and strategies, typical funding sources, the development of business presentations to attract outside funding, the due diligence process, and the strategies for negotiations for funding.