Italy

This course provides students with tools to think critically and autonomously about economic ideas and public policy. The course develops the skills to elaborate a map of the successive interfaces between economics and policy, and to understand the major controversies surrounding the development of positive and normative economics. Economists think and write about the world in order to understand the way economic systems function, but also – sometimes – in order to transform them. This course provides an in-depth understanding of the role of economists in public policy since the end of the 19th century. The course is structured in three parts: 1) a description of the different regimes of the interventions of economists in policy. This part explores the evolution of the role of economists and the status of economic knowledge, from the margins to the core of policymaking, following the successive regimes of intervention. Then it analyzes the changing nature of economists’ role in policy after the Great Depression and post-war deregulation movement; 2) a series of case studies focused on institutions. This part is devoted to a series of historical case studies focused on the development of policies aimed at tackling poverty, inequality, and discrimination. The use of economics is explored in specific institutions; 3) an exploration of conflicting values through the history of public economics. The last part is about the practice and the scholarship on public policy. It investigates the history of the fields of welfare and public economics since the 1930s and the treatment of conflict between the positive and normative approaches in economics.

The course focuses on the principal elements of EU constitutional law, namely: sources of EU law, EU competences, institutions, law-making procedures, judicial procedures, implementation of EU law in the Member States, and the essential aspects of the main EU policies. The course helps develop the ability to analyze the main implications of the EU institutional structure and to determine the overall effects of the law into the municipal legal orders of the Member States; and to illustrate the main trends of the interplay between the Union and its Member States (both internally and on the international scene).

This course discusses insights into sustainable corporate communication in the digital age, and stakeholder relations from a sustainability perspective. The course analyzes and evaluates how business environment and sustainability issues affect corporate communication, how companies engage in the best practice of sustainability and corporate communication, and how companies foster stakeholder trust and relationships. Knowledge from this course may be applied to case studies to understand sustainability and corporate communication in the real life. This course equips students who are interested in ESG with skills on sustainability and corporate communication to help them become future leaders of sustainable sectors, industries or companies. 

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale degree program and is intended for advanced level students. Enrollment is by permission of the instructor. This course studies the economics of competition and antitrust, with a special focus on financial and banking markets. The course covers how to define the relevant markets, how to measure the market power of agents, and the degree of market concentration. The course then introduces major antitrust violations and the typical measures taken to stop competition-harming behavior (from price fixing to abuse of dominance). The course considers antitrust implications of network interconnectedness in different segments of financial markets (included payment systems). The economic analysis of merger regulation is also examined. At the end of the course, the student knows how to apply the most important economic models to antitrust cases, and knows how to use rigorous models in the analysis of competition policy issues. Topics covered in this course include: Introduction to competition policy: definition, history, and the law; Market power and Welfare; Market definition and the assessment of market power; Art 101 TFEU : Collusion and Horizontal Agreements; Horizontal mergers; Vertical mergers; and Predation, monopolization, and other abusive practices.

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale degree program and is intended for advanced level students. Enrollment is by permission of the instructor. The course provides knowledge of a portion of the vast field of diaspora studies. The course covers diasporic cultures, imaginaries, consciousness, subjectivities, and practices across a variety of contexts and assesses the stakes of ‘diaspora’ as an analytical concept as well as lived experience. The course also covers the importance of intertwining critical race theory with ethnography in order to understand diasporic subjectivities are racialized. The course also equips students with decolonial approaches and methodologies to migration and diaspora studies, building the tools to critically engage with historical and contemporary debates around identity, nationalism, race, multiculturalism, and difference. "Diaspora" as a concept has enabled an understanding of identities and cultures beyond national, ethnic, or racial connotations. Diaspora functions as a vision to think of subjectivities and communities not as epiphenomena of nation-states but as springboard for de-territorialized and transnational cultural and political formations and political subjectivities. The first part of the course introduces anthropological and social theories of migration and looks at what Diaspora as a heuristic device has brought to studies and understandings of home, belonging, identities, and political cultures. In the second part, the course focuses on how liberal states manage Diasporas through containment, confinement, disciplining, and through a highly emotional politics of fear. Finally, the course analyzes diasporas as "cultures of resistance" effecting a dissolution of borders and boundaries in their everyday aesthetic and performative practices.

This course introduces how to manage and interpret accounting processes, balance sheets, and understand accounting principles with a specific focus to European and international norms and principles. The course comprises two modules: financial accounting and management accounting. In financial accounting, this course focuses on accounting in action, the recording process, adjusting accounts, the accounting cycle, accounting for merchandising operations, and inventories. In management accounting, this course focuses on cost basics, costs behavior and cost-volume-profit relationship, absorption costing, short-term decision making, pricing, budgeting, and variance analysis. 

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale degree program and is intended for advanced level students. Enrollment is by permission of the instructor. The course offers an overview of the structure and main features of EU financial regulation, along with an in-depth examination of some of its main pillars. Topics covered by the course are the regulation of securities offerings, investment firms and investment services, investment funds, and securities markets. At the end of the course unit, students will possess an in-depth knowledge about the legal regime applicable to financial operators and relevant swap transactions, against the background of the applicable international and supranational legal instruments; they are thus able to understand financial operators’ behavior in a given political and economic context, and to envisage its impact on the regulatory framework concerning the functioning of financial markets.

This course focuses on the key issues in contemporary international relations., with the goal of learning the concepts and theories of IR useful to making sense of contemporary debates and developments in international politics. Focus is on the study of current events and the recent history that has shaped the international system, with specific attention devoted to foreign policy stances of big powers (the United States, China, and Russia), and to two topical international actors (the European Union and the United Nations). The second part of the course studies big trends and on-going international crises, including the rise of the Global South, the Ukraine War, and the Israel-Hamas conflict. This is followed by exploration of the four "Global challenges": energy security and climate change; migration; Africa's development; and digitalization and cybersecurity. 

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale degree program and is intended for advanced level students. Enrollment is by permission of the instructor. The course provides a high awareness of the specific nature of literary language both as a way through which the imaginary finds expression and as an instrument to interpret reality. Students must master interpretive tools and methodologies for text analysis. This course shows how to explore and investigate literary forms and themes in a comparative perspective, with a special focus on the relationships between different national tradition and different cultural/historical contexts, as well as the relationships between literary texts and other semiotic systems of expression (music, cinema, performance, theatre and so on). The course provides the capacity for autonomous reflection and formulating autonomous judgments on theoretical and methodological issues. In spring 2024, the course focused on objects in 19th century fiction: between realism and the fantastic. The course investigates the forms in which these phenomena manifest themselves, particularly in two fundamental modes of representation that face one another through the whole 19th century: realism and the fantastic.

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale degree program and is intended for advanced level students. Enrollment is by permission of the instructor. The course's main emphasis is on cultural heritage; it offers a bridge between the past and the future by means of the present. The course investigates the formation of the concept of cultural heritage in historical perspective and the European geographical spectrum. It also dwells on the cases of destruction of cultural heritage occurring throughout history. Starting from the shaping of urban landscapes through the ages, the course also addresses the heritage values of urban space, which are overall values derived from the integration of different components. The course provides: an understanding of the significance of urban environments through the transformations that occurred over time in relation to various political and institutional phases; a comparative view between Italian and European cities through specific examples; an ability to use sources such as aerial photos of urban settlements to identify the stages of their development from antiquity to the present; and recognition of the reasons for the shaping of Europe's cultural heritage and in particular its historical urban landscape.