London School of Economics

Organizations operate in an increasingly complex environment, where change is a constant feature of business life. As generative AI (GenAI) reshapes industries and transforms the way people work, understanding how to manage change and digital transformation becomes increasingly critical. While GenAI offers unparalleled opportunities to enhance efficiency and productivity, it also presents complex challenges for management. Taking a multidisciplinary, social science-based approach, this course equips students with the necessary leadership and change management skills to implement successful digital transformation projects. The course blends theory with hands-on learning, using case studies and an interactive simulation game, where students will apply their knowledge by making strategic decisions. Additionally, students gain practical experience through a real-life GenAI-focused consultancy project.

How have global forces shaped Africa’s states and economies—and how will today’s shifting world order define its future? In this course, students explore the evolution of contemporary Africa, examining the uneven trajectories of nations and regions through the lens of geography, history, geopolitics, and global markets. Students trace Africa’s place in the global system from the colonial era to Cold War developmentalism, to the neoliberal “Washington Consensus,” and the “Africa Rising” narrative driven by China’s ascent. Finally, students contemplate today’s tectonic shifts in global geopolitics and the current polycrisis of climate, geopolitics, and deglobalization. Through scholarly readings, policy reports, films, debates, and case studies, students critically engage with these pressing issues, gaining a deeper understanding of Africa’s past, present, and possible futures—while also better understanding the global economic and political shifts since the 1950s.

This course engages with the politics of policy making from queer and feminist perspectives, rooting the discussion in cultural discourse of contemporary society. Students discover how policies shape – and are shaped by – the lived experiences of individuals and communities. Students explore the importance of gender and sexuality for various forms of policymaking across local, national, and international levels. Using various innovative approaches and perspectives in gender and sexuality studies, the course investigates how sexual and gender inequalities, in connection with other power structures like race, ethnicity, and class, are embedded and activated in the policymaking process.

Are you looking to develop the skills to solve real-world challenges in finance, risk management, and insurance? These fields often deal with unpredictable phenomena—like investment decisions, insurance claim patterns, or pricing derivatives—which require robust stochastic models and advanced machine learning techniques. To tackle these challenges effectively, it’s essential to use robust statistical techniques and calibration methodologies to ensure models are reliable. This course equips students with the tools to apply modern statistical and machine learning methods to these complex problems. Students start by exploring Monte Carlo methods, simulating stochastic processes, and applying Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) in risk management. They then connect Generalized Linear Models to deep neural networks, discovering their practical applications in the insurance industry. The course also addresses the challenges of calibrating models to ensure their accuracy and reliability. Combining rigorous theory with hands-on coding exercises in Python, students gain experience implementing real-world case studies while strengthening their core data science skills.

The course delivers the concepts and models underlying the modern analysis and pricing of financial derivatives. The philosophy of the course is to first provide the firm foundations for understanding derivatives in general. The required technical tools are explained carefully, allowing students to learn the language and to be able to converse with derivatives professionals. Once the tools are in place, those same tools can then be applied to any derivative. Special emphasis is put on those derivatives that shape the modern world. Students should feel comfortable with calculus, probability, and statistics at the intermediate undergraduate level before taking this course.

The 20th century completely reconfigured global politics. These reconfigurations also transformed Britain’s international standing. This course examines the often-overlapping shifts behind this transformation – imperial decline, economic crises, world wars, Cold War, European integration. Using a foreign policy lens, it examines how successful Britain was in navigating global challenges; how it adapted its strategies and alliances as a result; and how the foreign policymaking process altogether evolved, from being mainly the domain of ambassadors to increasingly being shaped by individual prime ministers. In answering these questions, the course has three main aims. First, to offer students an overview of the international history of modern Britain; second, to establish a firm basis for further studies in foreign policy and/or British politics; third, to provide the conceptual tools necessary for understanding current political discourses. 

The course is an introduction to politics in a globalized world, with a focus on how political science tries to understand and explain cross-country and cross-time differences. The course begins by introducing students to some of the main empirical variations in political behavior, political institutions, and outcomes across the world, focusing mainly on democratic and partially democratic countries (in both the developed and developing world), and introduces students to some of the basic theoretical ideas and research methods in political science. Each subsequent week is devoted to a substantive topic, where a more detailed analysis of political behavior, political institutions, or political outcomes are presented and various theoretical explanations are assessed.

The course provides students with an understanding of organizational change as a multifaceted phenomenon and equips them with skills to adopt a reflective, multi-dimensional approach when managing change in their future careers. In their everyday jobs, managers need to identify when change is needed, manage its implementation or guide others through it. In this course students learn about theories, strategies, skills, and techniques for leading successful change.

This course addresses various topics in management research which encourage creative and logical thinking, structuring of clear arguments, and critical assessment of evidence. The intellectual backbone of the course is applied and empirical economics, including behavioral economics and finance, but wherever appropriate, the course discusses contributions from the psychology, sociology, and management literature. Students mainly deal with issues which are amenable to rigorous empirical investigation. Examples of questions considered are whether pain killers are more effective when they are expensive, whether successful entrepreneurs tend to have been juvenile delinquents, and gender differences in negotiation.