London School of Economics

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.

Exploring advanced theories used to understand financial markets in the context of corporate borrowing and lending, students discuss financing frictions that differentiate the functioning of perfect and imperfect capital markets. They then build on these theories to understand security design and the process of security issuance in equity markets. By applying the course material students evaluate corporate risk management and hedging, understand the role of corporate control, and the interaction of control rights and cash flow rights.

Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) issues have attracted enormous attention from investors, regulators, and other stakeholders. This course introduces the concept of sustainability reporting and responsible investing. It evaluates the potential benefits of firms disclosing ESG information, as well as significant challenges to be overcome, including the risk of greenwashing. Students learn about existing and emerging ESG regulations and frameworks for ESG performance metrics. The course also explores how key capital market participants, such as asset managers, analysts, and banks, could incorporate ESG information into their investment decisions.