London School of Economics

This course examines fundamental principles of financial accounting for the purposes of external reporting. The course starts with a discussion of the framework of financial accounting: its nature, intents, and purposes, and the context and environment in which it operates. This includes, and eventually entails, the need for, and various sources of, accounting regulation and accounting standards. The course unpacks various core financial accounting concepts and conventions, but the course also looks into the processes used to record, summarize, and present financial accounting information as well as, crucially, its interpretation. This course focuses on the preparation, interpretation, and limitations of company financial statements for external reporting, and the regulatory framework in which financial reports are prepared.

The course uses all the skills that students have developed as economists to try and answer important economic questions. Providing an answer is hard because solving the problem of world poverty is not as simple as reallocating income. The course uses rigorous impact evaluation to find out whether the intervention implied by theory works. 

This course answers the fundamental set of questions all entrepreneurs should ask themselves: When do we raise money? How much? From whom? Under what terms? What are the longer‐term implications of the chosen financing strategy? The course further considers the investor’s viewpoint as well, since understanding the motivations and incentives faced by ones counterpart is critical to avoiding financing pitfalls and successfully negotiating the best financing outcome for ones venture. Several cases concern technology‐based businesses, though the emphasis is on gaining insights into entrepreneurial finance.

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.