London School of Economics

The course begins with exploring the concept of the "urban" in urban studies literature by examining what urbanization means to the governments, businesses, and people whose lives are affected by changes to the built environment of cities and to the ecosystems that support them. It moves on to consider urban contestations over policy, planning, and development among a wide range of stakeholders, from real estate developers to social movements to international NGOs. This interactive course draws on examples of urban policy and planning practices from both the global North and the South, with emphasis on Asia, Latin America, and the North Atlantic. It also includes a field visit to central London.

The majority of the course focuses on analysis of inequality and poverty using monetary measures of living standards. The final section of the course broadens the perspective to consider a range of non-monetary and multidimensional measures reflecting the "Beyond Income" agenda.

This course examines the global politics of trade, development, and the environment against the background of continued economic globalization and the emergence of new forms of global governance. 

This course presents an advanced treatment of econometric principles for cross-sectional, panel and time-series data sets. While concentrating on linear models, some non-linear cases are also discussed, notably limited dependent variable models and generalized methods of moments. The course focuses on modern econometric techniques, addressing both technical derivations and practical applications. Applications in the areas of microeconomics, macroeconomics, and finance are considered.

This course covers keystone technologies from bioweapons to killer robots to provide insight into pressing political questions such as: What role does technology play in warfare and in international security? How have the tools of war changed – and what do those changes mean for the laws, norms, ethics, conduct, and strategy of conflict? How can we combat the national and international security risks of emerging technologies?

The course considers how AI changes the legal landscape and how lawyers, and anyone interested in how our society is regulated, needs to adapt to this new landscape. It does so by examining how AI automates processes based upon data, a process known as datafication, and how data is used to train, and the algorithms at the heart of AI. It asks how this impacts our data privacy and whether data protection law is ready to deal with this new wave of personal data exploitation. From here it moves on to examine who controls the development and deployment of these algorithms, and how we might control their development and deployment in AI systems. It concludes by examining the current legal framework for AI regulation and asks how we should regulate AI and which approach is likely to be effective. 

This course is an introduction to the strategic management of modern diversified firms. It studies how the firm’s portfolio of products and its internal organization can be designed to maximize corporate performance. The focus of this course is on the strategic plan for managing a diversified firm. It studies how the firm portfolio of products and its internal organization can be designed to maximize corporate performance. It combines in a unified framework the study of two separate but complementary issues: the opportunities and challenges afforded by the firm’s external environment, and the resources and capabilities arising from the firm’s internal environment.

This course takes both a short and long-term view of the economy, helping students understand recent developments in macroeconomics using graphic analysis and simple algebra. It focuses on the stylized facts of business cycle fluctuations, economic growth, and unemployment. Embedding students' learning through the analysis of real-world situations, including the European Monetary Union, the European Crisis and the Great Recession, students discuss how modern macroeconomics can shed light on these important areas and evaluate the scope for policy to improve macroeconomic performance.

This course introduces students to a range of high-profile controversies by viewing them through the prism of the law. It enables the students to transcend the culture wars by critically engaging with the moral, political, and legal issues at stake and by becoming skilled participants in the respective debates. Students engage with some of the most important and controversial political issues of our time, and these issues will be approached by studying and comparing landmark judgments from the world’s most influential and powerful courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court, the Canadian Supreme Court, the South African Constitutional Court, the European Court of Human Rights, the U.K. Supreme Court, and the German Federal Constitutional Court. 

This course explores key concepts and recent advances in environmental economics with the view to addressing environmental policy questions. It is concerned with studying the interaction between human activity and the natural environment. Students capture work both on how economic growth can be made cleaner but also on how to mitigate the damages from this growth. The course illustrates how frontier theory and empirics from economics can be brought to bear on the key climate, environmental and energy challenges that face mankind.