1 - 9 of 9 results for: POLECON

This course will provide both theoretical and practical assistance to students who will be engaged in global business -- in terms of understanding and negotiating issues of custom, cultural ethos, and underlying religious traditions which are often unspoken but critical to business success. Frameworks and modes of analysis will be presented that can be used universally, but then will be applied concretely, through case studies, to business contexts in China, Japan, India, the Middle East, Israel, Europe, Africa, Latin America, and the United States. Background information will be included on major religious traditions involved, like Buddhism, Confucianism, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism and Christianity. The class will be discussion-based, drawing on students' own life experience as well as that of invited guests who are personally familiar with business practices in various parts of the world.

In a globalized world, managers and investors are increasingly realizing that politics matter as much as economic fundamentals. Micro-level decisions made by local politicians in Brazil or India, national-level strategies of countries like China and Russia, and multi-national regimes, policies, and norms are all affecting global businesses in significant and often surprising ways. This course examines the full array of political risks confronting businesses today, from creeping expropriations to sudden shocks like national debt defaults and coups to emerging threats like cyber exploitation. Students will learn about impediments to assessing political risk and how to tackle them; develop strategies for managing political risk in a systematic way; and craft tools for mitigating the downside effects of political risk to business. Each session will include customized case studies and mini-simulations for students to walk in the shoes of senior managers confronting these challenges.

This course critically surveys empirical applications of formal models of collective-choice institutions. It is explicitly grounded in philosophy of science (e.g., Popperian positivism and Kuhn¿s notions of paradigms and normal science). Initial sessions address the meanings and roles of the concept of institutions in social-science research. Historically important works of political science and/or economics are then considered within a framework called Components of Institutional Analysis (or CIA), which provides a fully general way of evaluating research that is jointly empirical and formal theoretical. The course concludes with contemporary instances of such bridge-building. The over-arching objectives are to elevate the explicitness and salience of desirable properties of research and to illustrate the inescapable tradeoffs among the stipulated criteria.n nAlthough this is a core course in the GSB Political Economy PhD curriculum, its substantive foci may differ across years depending on the instructor. For Professor Krehbiel¿s sessions, the emphasis is on legislative behavior, organization, and lawmaking, and on inter-institutional strategic interaction (e,g, between executive, legislative, and judicial branches in various combinations).n nStudents should have taken POLECON 680. POLECON 682 is also listed as POLISCI 351C.

This course surveys emerging research in political economics as it applies to developing societies, emphasizing both theoretical and empirical approaches. Topics will include: corruption and "forensic" political economics, institutional reform and democratization, ethnicity, conflict and public goods provision, and the role of trade and financial innovations in political development. The aim of the course is to bring students to the frontier of the field and develop their own research. Graduate level proficiency in microeconomics and empirical methods will be required.

This course is offered for students requiring specialized training in an area not covered by existing courses. To register, a student must obtain permission from the faculty member who is willing to supervise the reading.