London School of Economics

The course explores the major theoretical models of Political Economy and the available empirical evidence. Sample topics include social choice theory and preference aggregation; comparative electoral systems; political economy of income redistribution; turnout in elections; strategic and sincere voting; political parties; debates and communication; political agency models; citizen-candidate models; and empirical studies of political selection, representation and policy outcomes, bureaucracy, gender and politics, and conflict. Empirical studies will be mostly focused on developing countries.

Through this course, students gain access to research-led lectures and the latest scholarship to properly understand how digital platforms work and the roles they play in society. Students apply this knowledge to case studies to understand how platforms are shaped and where citizens might intervene in their governance. Students engage in debates to think about how to critically engage with technological power and to mitigate the social harms of platforms.

This course covers theories and processes of contemporary urban development from a critical political economy perspective, addressing urban problems and policy responses in our rapidly urbanizing world. The course examines what urbanization means to the state, to (global/domestic) businesses, and ordinary citizens, focusing on a selected set of key themes that are pertinent to the understanding of urban injustice. Such themes may include, but are not limited to, the understanding of the (social) production of unequal urban space, global circulations of urbanism, gentrification, displacement, and dispossession. Case studies are largely drawn from a diverse range of cities across the world, providing opportunities for students to contest urban theories that have largely been rooted in the experiences of the advanced economies.

This course offers a rigorous examination of the theory and practices relevant to brand management. Its core objectives are to provide an understanding of the important issues in crafting and evaluating brand strategies, to provide the appropriate theories, models, and analytical tools that enable managers to make well-informed brand management decisions, and to provide a platform for students to apply these principles.

Students learn about the science of wellbeing, including wellbeing as a measure of welfare and its different conceptualizations such as evaluations and experiences of happiness; behavioral scientific phenomena uniquely captured by wellbeing such as adaptation to changing life circumstances, our tendency to make mistakes and mispredict what actually makes us happy, and relative comparisons (or jealousy); and how happiness differs between individuals and societies. Importantly, students then learn how to apply these insights to policy-making, including policy design, appraisal, and evaluation. Students are being familiarized with wellbeing theories and frameworks; data, measurement, and survey design; methods for wellbeing policy appraisal, including cost-benefit and cost-effectiveness analysis; wellbeing policy evaluation; social welfare; and wellbeing interventions.

This course equips students with an in-depth understanding of what competition law entails, alongside the broader policy issues that it raises. The focus is the structure and substance of the EU competition rules with a comparative assessment of other competition systems, particularly the laws of the United States. Since most competition systems globally borrow from one or both of these jurisdictions, the intention is to provide students with the necessary understanding and skills to address antitrust problems wherever in the world they arise.

Intellectual property is at the core of all modern economies. Digital technologies are shaped by rights of creators and inventors, and the licensing practices that have evolved around these rights. Thus, understanding what intellectual property rights protect is indispensable to understand the world around us. This course introduces the intellectual property law system and its role in forming the building blocks of the modern economy.

This course offers a dynamic exploration of the current and emerging regulatory frameworks guiding Digital Finance or FinTech. It closely examines how laws and regulations across key markets, including the UK, EU, and US, are adapting, striving for a balance between fostering innovation and mitigating risks.

Students examine the legal standards that govern the state’s power to control, coerce, and punish those suspected (or proven) to have committed crimes. Students also explore how these laws are exercised by legal actors, including police, prosecutors and judges in their routine decisions and practices. The course speaks directly to the real-world issues and controversies encountered by criminal justice systems in many developed democracies today – racial injustices, abuses of police power, mass incarceration, penal populism, law’s potential to reform organizations, to name but a few.

This course provides a solid foundation in corporate finance law covering three components. The first component is an introduction to corporate finance theory, which covers the nature of equity and debt as well as an introduction to how capital markets work and the theories of capital structure and valuation. The second covers the regulation of legal capital, including the relevant core accounting concepts, the regulation of dividends and share buy-backs. The third addresses the issuance of debt and equity, and related aspects of securities regulation such as insider trading and disclosure regulation, as well as mergers and acquisitions.