London School of Economics

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. 

Students study the theoretical and practical aspects of financial markets, and learn how modern financial markets work. Engaging with leading faculty and your peers, students are introduced to modern investment portfolio management strategies covering topics such as diversification, asset allocation, portfolio optimization, the relationship between risk and return, factor models and equity valuation. Students also tackle some of the fundamental issues that arise in investment management, such as market efficiency, behavioral biases of investors, and market liquidity. 

This course covers a range of substantive topics and issues, such as the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians and Arab-Israeli relations; the influence of non-state actors such as Hamas and Hezbollah; regional balances between Saudi Arabia and Iran; and the 7 October 2023 war and its regional consequences. Students dive deeply into domestic political developments, including those that have emerged in the decade since the "Arab Uprising”. More broadly, the course places the region at the intersection of global and local politics, examining the roles played by the United States, Russia, and Europe.

This course provides some intellectual pathways from GY100. Human Geography is a broad subject and there may be changes in the particular topics from year to year. Topics to be discussed include Imperialism, East and West; contemporary geopolitics; concepts of “home” and Patriarchy; material aspects of globalization such as containerization and shipping; non-economic aspects of agglomeration in cities;  biopolitics and the geography of disease and viruses; the geography of affect or feelings; soundscapes and music.

The course provides an introduction to tax policy that links real-world debates about the tax system with ideas from a range of academic disciplines, including political theory, economics, and sociology, as well as law. It addresses real-world debates about tax policy as they appear in the media and in politics, but to do so in an academically rigorous way. The course adopts an interdisciplinary approach that draws on ideas from across the social sciences to address two main questions: why do we have the tax policies we have, and how can our current tax system be improved? The main examples will be taken from the UK and US contexts, but the insights generated are truly global.

This course focuses on data about connections, forming structures known as networks. Networks and network data describe an increasingly vast part of the modern world, through connections on social media, communications, financial transactions, and other ties. The course covers the fundamentals of network structures, network data structures, and the analysis and presentation of network data. Students work directly with network data and structure, and analyze these data using R.

This course provides an introduction to the management accounting and financial control concepts that are used in strategic decision-making, in order to effectively perform in a competitive business environment. Covering issues such as technology and digitalization, corporate strategy, marketing, and modern cost management tools, students critically analyze how these tools can be used to increase performance.

This course introduces students to the study and history of these economic inequalities. It is a detailed survey of the key evidence on inequality, both contemporary and historical, and the sources and methods used to measure it. Students learn how to critically interrogate the quality of inferences from such evidence. They explore the dimensions of inequality along historical, contemporary, spatial, ethnic, and gender lines, drawing on research in economic history, economic geography, and sociology.