Electives

Conflict and violence produce disruptive impacts over the security, economic, and social wellbeing of our interconnected societies. In a time when conflicts are on a rise and growing in complexity, a better understanding of their dynamics and of the means to address and solve them are a paramount necessity for future leaders and policymakers. This course offers the opportunity to develop analytical skills to understand today’s armed conflict and to learn key tools of conflict resolution. Not only it aims to equip students with a better understanding of how to address and solve contemporary armed conflicts and disputes, but also to develop assessment techniques that can be useful throughout their professional career.

This course is designed to introduce students to the politics of Southeast Asia. It will focus on six countries—the Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, and Myanmar. The course aims to integrate practical and empirical knowledge of these countries’ political systems with concepts from political science that support a deeper, fundamental understanding of SEA politics. These insights will draw on core substantive concepts and themes in political science, including democratization, liberalism and reformism, ethnic conflict and integration, patronage and clientelism, among others, The course is centered around the following questions: What are the foundational political issues facing the various Southeast Asian countries? How do the tools and insights of political science enhance our understanding of these countries’ politics? How does politics shape governance? The course does not require quantitative training. The focus will be on ideas and their relationship to actual politics.

Good governance and managing conflicting ethical demands are key skills for policy makers. This course seeks to introduce students to the ethical aspects of some major problems in global governance. Topics include foundations of ethical theory, human rights, intervention, climate change, immigration and trade. Background readings come mostly from moral philosophical, political theory and political science. Each session pays special attention to a particular policy area in the international domain and thereby combines philosophical inquiry with applied questions. The course does not have any formal prerequisites.

The primary goal of this class is to evaluate the theoretical, empirical, and policy issues affecting security relations in the Asia-Pacific. The course examines the complex and sometimes turbulent inter-state interactions in the region, as well as their evolving political, economic, and security relations. Students will evaluate how existing theories of international politics apply to the Asia-Pacific and gain a deeper appreciation of the determinants for conflict and cooperation in the region.

We seek to understand institutional changes in a Leninist, single-party authoritarian state. Our overarching goal is to explain how politics and the evolution of political institutions help explain the patterns and outcomes of major socioeconomic reforms. A number of questions run through the course: Who were the important actors driving China’s rapid economic transformation? What incentivized them to pursue change? What was the role of the central state and its local agents? How did property rights emerge and evolve in an authoritarian state? Why some reforms succeeded others not (yet)? What explains the sequence of reform? Who are the winners and losers, and why? What are some of the unintended consequences of reform? While the focus is on China, important themes in political economy will be drawn and discussed so as to frame discussions in a broader comparative, theoretical setting.

This course introduces game theoretic tools to examine strategic behaviour and its consequences for a wide range of economic, political, and social applications. We develop important techniques to better navigate strategic interactions from decision-making under risk and uncertainty, collective decision-making, agenda setting and strategic voting, negotiating and bargaining, the value of common knowledge, information disclosure with signalling and screening, participating in auctions, and designing strategy-proof mechanisms in practice. We also highlight the limitations of rationality in practice and develop strategic analysis and institutional design techniques in light of individual/collective decision-making given such empirical (ir-)regularities from behavioural economics.

This course offers a critical examination of the multifaceted challenges and opportunities presented by the rapid advancement and deployment of artificial intelligence (AI). Students will engage with cutting-edge research, real-world case studies, and theoretical frameworks to gain a nuanced understanding of the complex interplay between AI, governance, and society. The course will delve into emerging policy responses, regulatory innovations, and ethical considerations that are shaping the governance of AI, with a particular focus on mitigating risks, fostering responsible AI development, and maximizing its benefits for social good. Topics include the foundational concepts of AI and governance, the current landscape of AI development, benefits and risks of AI, AI governance and its challenges, national and international AI governance frameworks, issues around trust, algorithmic bias, privacy, and data protection in AI systems, as well as policy tools proposed to address them and the social and economic impacts of AI.

This course examines international security by exploring key theories and the empirical evidence on major topics in the field. It begins with core concepts, levels of analysis, and major research approaches that provide a foundation for scientific inquiry. Building on this, the course covers central debates, including the causes, dynamics, and consequences of war; the role of domestic politics, leaders, and public opinion; and alliance and nuclear politics. It also examines emerging areas of research, including emerging technologies, post-conflict peacebuilding, and international migration.

The course looks at health and human development in the context of a global economy. We will study the large improvements in health that have occurred in the last two centuries due to rising incomes and technological advances in public health and heath care. These health improvements will be linked to human capital and increased worker productivity as well as longer life spans and savings for retirement. The effects of health on population growth and development will also be investigated. We will look at the welfare implications of health improvements, economic growth, and globalization.

Education is one of the most fundamental areas of policy, as education impacts many aspects of life and society. This module uses the theoretical and empirical tools of economics to study education and education policy. Major topics include the monetary and non-monetary benefits of education; educational inequality with respect to gender, race/ethnicity, and socioeconomic status; and policy issues such as compulsory schooling, girl-friendly schools, and school choice. Examples are drawn internationally.

Traditional economics, which is one of the key theoretical cornerstones of public policy, typically assumes that human behavior is rational, preferences are stable, and individuals are smart and unemotional. However, human behavior often deviates from standard assumptions due to psychological and social factors; analysis based on traditional economics can therefore misinform policies and lead to detrimental consequences. This course discusses behavioral regularities that are of potential importance for public policy. Students will be exposed to behavioral economic theory and its applications to public policy in the areas of savings, investment, healthcare, climate change, taxation, labor supply, and monetary policy.

This course covers policy issues of modern ageing societies, with special emphases on social policy, families, and comparisons between Asian countries and Western countries. To tackle the complex issues, we discuss both relevant theories and empirical evidence from various disciplines including sociology, economics, public health, and human biology. The first section investigates the underlying causes of population ageing and presents trends in population age distributions around the globe. In the second section, we review old-age support provided by the government, the family, and the elderly themselves, and discuss challenges of providing the support. Lastly, the third section describes policy options to mitigate the consequences of population ageing and evaluates the policies.

This course deals with social policy issues with special reference to Southeast Asian countries. The policies analysed include those relating to ethnicity, urbanisation, housing, migration, labour, poverty and its alleviation, education and health. The ideas of state responsibility to provide for basic needs and of a social safety net are considered.

This course is designed to improve the understanding and applications of the principles and policies of sustainability and the environment. It examines the policy challenges of achieving global sustainability where strides have been made in some respects, notably poverty alleviation, while others, strikingly climate change and mass species extinction, have accelerated at alarming rates. The course will shift attention from “implementing” what are often self-standing and competing sustainability goals, to focusing on developing “fit for purpose” policy designs for effectively and urgently prioritising make or break sustainability conundrums.

This course aims to provide students with an understanding of some of the challenges and solutions to problems faced by developing countries across four key themes: public health, education, finance and financial technologies, and labour markets. The course will draw on recent advances in development economics and focus on new challenges faced by developing countries post-COVID-19. Students will develop a set of empirical tools that can be applied to the analysis of development related policy problems. This course will focus on empirical microeconomic development economics.

This course provides an overview of the economic theories and concepts most relevant to health and healthcare. It introduces students to the theories of consumer and producer behavior, the interaction of economic agents in competitive markets, and market failures, with a focus on their implications for health policy. Topics include demand for health and health care, health insurance, physician and hospital behavior, pharmaceutical markets, and other related topics. This course seeks to help students develop intuition for thinking about challenges facing health care systems in an economic framework by connecting theories to contemporary health policy issues and empirical work.

This course aims to introduce students to various issues confronting workers, employers, and institutions in the labour market. By familiarizing ourselves with the canonical theories in labour economics and econometrics, we will improve our capacity to understand the modern-day challenges to the labour market, including labor force participation, changing returns to education and job training, technological changes, mobility and migration, productivity and wage, discrimination, signaling in job search, and challenges entailing globalization. We will continue with an analysis of policy interventions implemented to resolve the issues, such as social welfare programs, anti-discrimination laws, immigration reform, minimum wage, and on-the-job training.

This course looks at pension systems design and public policy issues associated with retirement income provision in Singapore and internationally. It provides students with an understanding of different models of social security systems, the economics and finance of pensions, governments’ role in pension provision, and reform options. Topics covered include: rationale for state involvement; types of pension schemes; plan design and policy choices; Singapore’s Central Provident Fund scheme; fiscal sustainability of pension systems; distributional issues and risk sharing; recent reforms and policy developments; and international comparisons;. A special focus is given to the implications of population ageing on pension policy.

This course examines the concepts and theories pertaining to the introduction and governance of novel technologies in cities. We will explore innovative practices, analyse the environmental, societal, and economic impacts of various technologies and study analytical approaches that can aid us in devising smart policy solutions to utilise them while minimising their risks and unintended consequences. Some of the topics covered are: conceptions of future cities, risk and unintended consequences, design for socio-technical transitions, and governance of risks of novel technologies. We will analytically explore issues around crowdsourcing, sharing economy, 3d printing, ridesharing, autonomous systems, blockchains and automation.

This course aims to broaden one's perspective on markets and marketplaces. We learn how to design markets, institutions, and organizations in practice, and analyze their allocative properties, induced incentives, and limitations, to help formulate regulatory policy. The course underscores practical takeaways in designing a wide range of markets, e.g., auctions for procurement and spectrum allocation, matching markets to assign students to schools, doctors to hospitals, and resettle refugees, centralized versus decentralized labor markets for civil servants, online market platforms, natural monopolies for electricity, and incentive schemes promoting pharmaceutical R&D. We cover issues like fairness, efficiency, simplicity, transparency, externalities, and collusion.

Will technological change lead to mass unemployment and civil unrest? This module aims to introduce students to the implications of technological changes in the labour market, through the lens of economics, sociology, demography, and other subfields of social science. One of the central themes of the module is the notion that technology holds heterogenous effects on the labour market constituents. In this course, we will delve into the sources of the heterogeneity. We will also examine and evaluate the current individual- and firm- level efforts as well as policy efforts to regulate the nature and the pace of workplace technologies.

The course will explore the features, applications, benefits and risks of emerging technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Digital Currencies, Cloud, 5G, IoT, 3D Printing and Robots on social policy (education, healthcare, insurance, social safety nets), employment and wages, fiscal policy (taxation and expenditure), transport and smart cities and implications for politics and social cohesion (fake news, deep fake, election manipulation). It will explore policies and regulatory implications in terms of growth, equity, security, privacy, efficiency and risk management for Singapore. The course will be comparative in perspective and will draw from the experience of the US, China, Europe, Japan and Singapore.

This course will provide students with an overview of how the environment affects health outcomes and health behaviors. Students will examine how policies that influence the various dimensions of the environment can affect population health, even if these policies do not directly target health as an outcome. For example, building a new expressway might have unanticipated negative effects on residents nearby due to the noise generated both by construction and car-traffic. Through this course, students will gain insights on how to integrate public health considerations into policy-making and planning, and help achieve better health and health equity in urban environments.

Increasing longevity and declining fertility rates have shifted the age distribution of populations around the globe. Economics of Ageing as a field has become increasingly important as many countries are facing rapid population ageing. This course will examine the economic challenges and opportunities associated with an ageing population eg. how the demographic shift affects labor supply and productivity, retirement saving and wealth, intergenerational transfers, social security and pension design, healthcare financing, long-term care. Students will gain an understanding of how demographic changes shape the economy, as well as policy responses to address the challenges of an ageing population.

The course examines why and how governments intervene in the development of urban areas. Students will review debates about a ‘good city’ should be and examine models of a ‘good city’ which have inspired planners past and present. We will examine the goals and urban interventions typically implemented as part of each model; as well as critiques. Students will be equipped with knowledge and skills to critically assess typical urban policies, plans and projects that contribute positively or otherwise to the many facets of a good city.

Changes in the environment are challenging conventional policy processes and tools for problem solving. This course intends to equip students with the skills needed to understand and analyse the complexity and dynamics of environmental change and tools to design effective policies in response. The course covers both theory as well as practical application of concepts at the core of environmental policy design. Through case discussions, guest lectures, and policy simulation exercises, students will explore a range of policymaking contexts and problem-solving approaches. The course will draw on both historical case studies and contemporary environmental issues.

Around the world, differences in life outcomes are often structured according to social identities. The objective of this course is to understand the extent and nature of social inequality and to study policy options to reduce it. We will examine five dimensions of identity—gender, race/caste, color, body, and sexuality. Three questions will guide our learning journey: WHAT are the gaps between social groups? WHY do those gaps exist? HOW can policy close the gaps when warranted? Drawing on quantitative evidence from across the social sciences, we will focus on two countries for each identity area.

This course links the fields of macroeconomic and financial policies. It provides coverage of economic principles that underlie the operation of banks and other financial institutions. The role of money in the economy and the impact of the central bank and monetary policy on the macro-economy are emphasized, as is the understanding the foreign exchange market and some basics of monetary theory and international finance. The focus of this course is on analytics.

This course is an introduction to selected aspects of Asian economic development and the region’s interactions with the rest of the world. It will focus on developing simple analytical tools to understand key trends and macroeconomic, financial and trade policy issues that confront Asia in the world economy. Topics covered include sources of growth in the Newly Industrializing Economies (NIEs) in East Asia, the rise of China and India and their impact on the global trading system, foreign direct investment to Asia, currency crisis in Asia, Asia in the global financial system, and issues relating to Asian economic regionalism. 

Emerging economies in Asia and elsewhere face multiple challenges in managing their economies in the face of financial globalization. This course examines the various dimensions of financial globalization, their costs and benefits, analytical and policy questions relating to the transmission of financial shocks, and how emerging economies can safeguard against sharp booms and busts in capital flows. Specific attention will be paid to the role of US dollar as a global currency and its outsized impact on emerging economies and how it affects their macroeconomic policy choices. Other topics that will be considered include impact and determinants of the composition of capital flows, definitions, impact of currency manipulation, and growing financial stability concerns of climate change. The focus will be on real-world examples, with the course being applied and topical in nature.

The main objective of this module is to provide students with a deeper understanding of the reasons for and patterns of rapid growth in incomes in Asian countries. To accomplish this objective, the course will employ analytical frameworks and methods, based mainly on economic theory and through a poverty and equity lens. The interdependence between the growth process and the distribution of its opportunities (poverty and equity) will also be examined along with the role of social protection and safety nets in protecting welfare from the negative impacts of shocks, alleviating poverty and promoting productive inclusion through transfer programs. We will examine the determinants of accumulation of physical and human capital by individuals, firms, and communities, and productivity and efficiency of resource allocation across activities and time.

The module brings students up to date on the state of the field of international trade – both theory and empirics, without relying on overly technical models. The first part provides an overall understanding of international trade theory – comparative advantage, gains and losses, scale and scope, exporting vs non-exporting firms, offshoring and outsourcing; the second part resolves some common misconceptions about trade often seen in the media, and highlights key lessons from the latest empirical research; the third part focuses exclusively on trade policy in Asia, with episodes from Japan, China, India, South Korea, Bangladesh, Indonesia, and others.

This is a course on intermediate macroeconomics that introduces students to important concepts and analytical tools frequently used by economists to tackle a range of macroeconomic issues that are relevant to businesses, governments and households. It examines issues relating to long-term growth as well as business cycles. Significant attention is paid to macroeconomic stabilisation (fiscal and monetary policy). The course also introduces some basic open macro economy issues such as balance of payments, exchange rates and currency crises. The aim will be to provide coherent analytical frameworks and theoretical foundations to understanding contemporary global macroeconomic policy challenges.

This course offers a comprehensive exploration of macroeconomic theory and policy from both national and global perspectives. Through case studies of advanced and emerging/developing economies, with a particular focus on China, and India. Students will examine the institutional similarities and differences that shape these countries' economic landscapes.

This course explores how public policy affects jobs, carbon emissions and prices in the global economy. It draws on insights from international trade and environmental economics to describe the complex interaction of global production and transport networks and illustrates how policy interventions such as tariffs and carbon taxes propagate through global supply chains. As policy moves through the network, it can have many unintended consequences and create complicated trade-offs. The goal of the class is to understand these trade-offs and to design policies that account for the complexities of our global economy.

Understanding the various roles of public actors in financial markets is critical for public policymakers. The objective of this course is to understand how federal and local governments and various government entities access financial markets for both funding of public expenditures and investment purposes. The first half of the course focuses on sovereign debt, municipal bonds, and green bonds. The second half focuses on public pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, and public private partnerships. Financial theory is used to lay the foundations for the various topics. Cases are drawn from various countries and regions.

This course is an introduction to international economic development with applications to and examples from Asia. The primary focus of the course will be on developing simple analytical tools to understand key global trends and macroeconomic, financial and trade policy issues that confront Asia in the world economy. While economic globalisation is a complex, multi-dimensional process, two integral aspects of economic globalisation – international financial flows and trade flows -- have affected the way the region’s development pathways have evolved over the years.

Cost Benefit Analysis (CBA) is one of the most widely-used tools in public policy to help decision-makers choose between different projects. As the name suggests, CBA is essentially a comparison of a project’s costs and benefits. The popularity of this tool is due to its intuitive and direct application. In this module, we will learn the fundamental concepts and techniques behind the application of CBA. The goal of this class is to equip students with theoretical knowledge that underpins CBA and the practical steps in conducting a CBA study.

This course introduces game theoretic tools to examine strategic behavior and its consequences for a wide range of economic, political, and social applications. We develop important techniques to better navigate strategic interactions from decision-making under risk and uncertainty, collective decision-making, agenda setting and strategic voting, negotiating and bargaining, the value of common knowledge, information disclosure with signaling and screening, participating in auctions, and designing strategyproof mechanisms in practice. We also highlight the limitations of rationality in practice and develop strategic analysis and institutional design techniques in light of individual/collective decision-making given such empirical (ir-)regularities from behavioral economics.

This module covers the major topics of social survey research. It focuses on questionnaire design but also covers topics like sampling, survey modes, interpreting survey data, using survey evidence in decision- making, and research ethics. The course is practical: students will not only learn about questionnaire theory and survey methodology, but they will also use that knowledge in developing their own questionnaires. While focusing on public opinion and internet-based social science survey research, the skills covered in this course will also be applicable for market and organisational research, policymaker surveys, and more.

Behavioural Insights (BI) is a leading tool for policy makers in policy formulation, evaluation and public management. Internationally, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) are prominent global champions of BI adoption in public policy and communications. This module introduces the BI lifecycle that includes scientific foundations, behavioural measurement, data collection, experimental design and messaging framing for policy communications.