London School of Economics

The course examines the theory of financial decision-making by firms and examines the behaviour of the capital markets in which these decisions are taken. The topics covered are the theory of capital budgeting under certainty in perfect and imperfect capital markets, sources of funds, basic theory of capital structure and the cost of capital, company dividend decisions and financial markets and institutions. This course covers the same topics as FM215. Thus, both FM211 and FM215 are equivalent content-wise. However, compared to FM215, this course puts less emphasis on the underlying statistical theory and relies less on the use of mathematical methods. Nonetheless, the course is quantitative in nature, and familiarity with mathematical and statistical methods taught in first-year courses will be assumed.

This course introduces students to the forces that made, upheld, and unmade empires in modern global history (c. 1780-present). The course approaches empires in a global historical perspective, looking at them as frameworks of power and resistance, and identifying connections and comparisons. Transformations in world order is a central concern. The course begins with imperial expansion, resistance and independence movements during the global period of revolution and global war in the 1780s. It traces the growth and consolidation of formal and informal empire through conquest and trade in the 19th and 20th centuries in Europe, Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, Latin America, and the Pacific, examining how changing conceptions of identity, race, nation, and belonging intersected with modes of political and economic power. The course also examines the impact of European imperial expansion on the empires of Asia and their transition from empire to nation-state in the international society of the 19th and 20th centuries. 

Human Rights are often assumed to have a precise 20th-century origin in the 1948 Universal Declaration or in the succeeding decades of increasing activism. However, the history of human rights discourse and its practical impact emerged as only the latest stage of a sequence of intellectual debates and real-life struggles in specific historical settings over political, religious, economic rights, broadly defined. Different cultural milieus have produced a variety of contexts for working out tensions between claims by individuals or minorities for autonomy on the one hand and the rival demands of collective obligation and identity on the other. This course seeks to explore an (inevitably selective) range of these historical contexts in order to demonstrate the continuity of perennial themes of conflict between the claims of individual actors and corporate institutions, whether states, churches, empires or other institutions, while also showing how and when key changes take place in the recognition of rights of political action, conscience, property ownership, gender identity, and workers’ rights etc. 

This course familiarize students with intermediate topics in logic. It focuses on concepts and theories that are useful for a deeper understanding and critical analysis of claims and arguments in contemporary philosophical research and in the social and natural sciences.

Studying sustainable development today means recognizing the urgency of social and environmental problems facing current and future generations across the world. Students explore the relationship between human lives and the environment, debate what human "development" and "sustainability" mean, and discuss how to understand these complex and flexible concepts together. The first term focuses on understanding current and historical challenges for sustainable development, and the second term looks more closely at sustainable development programs and proposed solutions. 

This course teaches the foundational knowledge necessary to understand how modern AI systems work, with a particular focus on deep neural networks. It moves from first principles through to exploring core training algorithms that power today’s models. 

Students will construct deep networks, image classification models, and generative models such as autoencoders as well as consider how transformer architectures enable large language models such as ChatGPT.

This course is an introduction to political geography. Topics covered include power and states, nationalism, collective mobilization and social movements, elections, and democratization.

The course introduces students to philosophical thinking about the justification of state authority and coercion, to familiarize students with the main methodological, conceptual, and normative issues in the study of political obligation, to teach students about some of the most influential political philosophers and their theories of the state, to encourage and enable students to think critically about the role of ideas such as consent, natural rights, or associative obligation following ideas in justifying political authority, and to help students to develop advanced reasoning skills by training them in abstract, philosophical arguments. The themes that the course covers include anarchism; libertarianism; perfectionism; the consent or social contract tradition; the associative obligation tradition; and democratic and critical (Marxist) theories of the state.

The EU is central to all of the most pressing challenges that we face: migration, environment, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, rule-of-law backsliding, AI regulation. It is the biggest and most ambitious experiment with governance beyond the state. This course focuses on how the EU works, and how it has navigated the tension between, on the one hand, the commitment to "do things together," solve collective problems by cooperation and the creation of institutions beyond the state, and, on the other hand, the desire for domestic self-rule, national interests and political identities. It covers the basic institutional, constitutional, and substantive discussions that animate EU law and that influence the EU-UK relationship. It covers the EU law aspects of the GLD and SQE. The course is composed of two parts. In the first weeks, students look at the EU’s institutional and legal structure. It covers the legislative process, the judicial institutions and the doctrines that are central to its legal order. The second part of the course moves from questioning how the EU works to what it actually does.