London School of Economics

The first half of this course gives students an integrated view of three important asset classes: fixed income securities, stocks, and derivatives. Through rigorous engagement with the course material, students learn key concepts of risk, return, diversification, portfolio theory, market efficiency theory, and the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM). Students also learn about derivative instruments like forwards, futures, options and swaps, and their practical application in trading. The second half of the course focuses on corporate finance and allows students to build strategic thinking skills in this area. Students learn how firms analyze and decide which investment opportunities they should pursue, as well as the different options for raising the necessary funds to finance those investments.

In this interactive course, you engage with the strategic, psychological, and cultural aspects of negotiations. Using live negotiation simulations, ranging from two-party negotiations to multi-party multi-issue negotiations, you have an opportunity to put into practice effective negotiation strategies based on academic research. Through rigorous reflection and feedback from peers and faculty, you learn about your own personal negotiation strengths and weaknesses, and you develop a personal plan to become a better negotiator.

Digital innovations transform the ways in which companies and individuals create and share information, offer innovative value creation propositions, define new economics patterns, and make possible unique business models. The course provides unique resources to understand how digital innovations change the economic dynamics of the contemporary economy and e-business practices.

This course engages the points of contention around the theorization and conceptualization of war as these arise from the debates and conversations between differing perspectives and schools of thought in IR, political studies, and the social sciences, including a specific emphasis on critical approaches. The course questions whether war has fundamentally changed in late modernity, or if it reveals a transhistorical continuity in its core nature, or, if people can identify a common logic in its aims, motivations, methods, practices and effects. Secondly, the course explores the transformative impact and effects of war. In this, it frames war as disruptive of certainties, highlighting the way it regularly undermines expectations, strategies and theories, and along with them, the credibility of those in public life and the academy presumed to speak with authority about it. 

This course is concerned with positive political economy and public choice theory applied to the study of political conflicts, democratic institutions, and public policy. The course covers the main tools for the study of public choice (rational decision-making theory, game theory, social choice theory) and a number of both theoretical and applied topics, including the empirical study of institutions. This course covers the main topics in positive political economy and institutional public choice. These include the aggregation of preferences; voting paradoxes and cycles; electoral competition and voting behavior; the problems of and solutions to collective action; welfare state and redistribution; the impact of information and mass media on voting behavior and public policy; the theory of coalitions, the behavior of committees and legislatures including agenda-setting and veto-player power; principal-agent problems in politics; models of bureaucracy.

Often the study of Economics begins with the Industrial Revolution, but recent work across the social sciences makes it increasingly clear that the important antecedents are found further in the past. The course takes students from the Neolithic Revolution to the present day. It will focus on the deep roots of divergence, considering economic and social structures before industrialization, exploring arguments about how and why living standards and economic performance have improved markedly, while at the same time, looking at how development has diverged between different societies and across societies at the same point in time. The course endeavors not just to describe these processes, but also to suggest and consider explanations for them.

The course examines the causes and effects of power, status, and conflict within organizations. The course focuses on understanding the bright and dark sides of power and status within hierarchies, from perspectives in psychology, sociology, and economics. The  course examines how these factors relate to conflict, rivalry, and competition within organizations. The course uses real world case studies to develop an understanding of management theory and its application to a range of business scenarios.