United Kingdom - England

The emergence of new powers is changing today's global order. Yet the economic and political developments underlying this new era have deep historical roots. This course teaches students to the major historical events and trends that have shaped the global economy, starting with the industrial revolution in the 18th century and the first period of true globalization in the 19th century, as imperialism and capitalism spread across the world. The 20th century is a story of both unprecedented growth and economic divergence. It is also one of repeated crises, from the First World War, the Great Depression, and the Second World War, through to the oil and debt crises of the 1970s and 1980s.

The course provides students with an overview of important topics in corporate finance. Topics include mechanisms of discounting, stocks and bonds, links between risk and return and their implications for corporate financial management, basic functioning of financial markets, implications of the firm’s capital structure, and key theories about market efficiency and behavioral finance. This is a technical module drawing heavily on mathematical techniques, although at moderate level. 

Our strength of beliefs influence our decision making. But how should we measure strength of belief, and what rational constraints are there on one's strength of belief? How should one's strengths of belief change in response to evidence? And how exactly ought one's strength of beliefs feed through into rational decision making? These are the central questions that students tackle in this course, where they are introduced to the probabilistic representation of strength of belief, arguments for the rationality of probabilistic degrees of belief, arguments for various rational constraints on those beliefs - including constraints concerning belief updates in response to evidence - and to decision theory.