London School of Economics

This course gives students an understanding of the full range of leading topics and areas of debate and research relevant to the analysis of political institutions and politics in Europe. The course focuses on both traditional fields of comparative inquiry, such as the study of party competition and voting behavior, and emerging fields of interest, such as national and European identities, immigration, and Europeanization. The course places particular emphasis on the diverse experiences of liberal democracy in different parts of Europe. The course covers not only long-established democracies in Western Europe, but also the relatively new democracies in Central and Eastern Europe. In addition, the course studies in depth a number of European countries, such as Britain, France, Germany, and Italy, analyzing the main developments in the country concerned in the last 20 years (elections, parties, governments). The course then examines issues of particular interest related to that country.

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. 

The course addresses the key questions which challenge all entrepreneurs: how much money can and should be raised; when should it be raised and from whom; what is a reasonable valuation of the company; and how should funding, and exit decisions be structured? The course uses case studies, with a particular focus on technology-based businesses. Students follow the founding history of a software unicorn from its early steps to exit. It examines a fast-growing on-demand food delivery start-up that is seeking an investor to cover its increasing need for working capital, and explores the information and context needed to value Peloton, the subscription-based fitness company whose stock price dropped after its IPO. The course also considers the investor’s viewpoint, in order to understand their motivations and incentives to avoid financing pitfalls and successfully negotiate the best financing outcome for a venture.

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.