Electives

This module will help students to understand the concepts and practice of leadership and develop a better knowledge of public service. Students will be exposed to insights and best practices, with emphasis on the public service and learn the skills to develop into a capable leader. Students will learn to lead, anticipate the future, make decisions, know their bias, build teams, motivate, communicate, understand the public interest and become better leaders. 

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 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 prioritizing make or break sustainability conundrums.

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.  

This course examines the fiscal role of government in contemporary public administration. It introduces students to key theories and practices in public finance, with a focus on budgeting, taxation, intergovernmental fiscal relations, and financial management in the public sector. Case studies from various governance systems, including Singapore, Hong Kong, and broader Asian and international contexts, will provide practical insights into the challenges and strategies of public finance management.

This project-based module allows students to develop innovative solutions to real-world policy problems. Students work in teams with external partners (government, corporate, incubators, non-profit organizations, foundations, etc.) to develop a concrete innovative “product" that addresses a specific public policy issue. Students work with their partner on a project. They participate in workshop-style lectures on key issues related to innovation including diffusion, disruption, and policy application, and on practical skills for policy innovation including design thinking, human-centered design, stakeholder analysis, and problem-solving processes. External partners reserve the right to select the student teams working on their proposed projects.

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 teaches students how to systematically analyse complex policy problems and conduct policy design to address long-term challenges. The skillset is generic and can be applied to different domains (e.g. Transport, Environment, Energy, Health, etc.). This makes this course crucial for professionals with functions that require long-horizon thinking and decision-making. Relevant theories and techniques and their limitations covered include system analysis, actor analysis, policy networks, problem formulation, definition of goal hierarchies, information gathering, generation of a library of policy measures, analysis and selection of policy measures, multi-criteria decision making, generation of alternative solutions, and analysis of their trade-offs.  

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 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... We cover issues like fairness, efficiency, simplicity, transparency, externalities, strategyproofness, collusion, corruption, and affirmative action. Roughly half our time is focused on designing auction markets while the other half is focused on designing matching markets.

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.

This course provides participants with a grounding in key pillars for successful leadership. It reflects upon the role of a leader, encouraging participants to think about the role of culture, of a vision, of aligned goals and metrics in enabling scaled execution. It explores building high performing teams and how each individual develops their own style of leadership based on their own strengths. Together with a series of practical implementations which can be put to immediate use, the course provides a framework which participants can refer back to, adding their own experiences and stories to enrich their leadership over time.