Courses

In a complex and difficult world, some idealism is needed to energize meaningful change. This course is for aspiring policy-makers who want to combine a necessary sense of optimism with real-world understanding of how to get things done. Each session will focus on specific examples of how practical solutions were found to seemingly intractable problems.

Open only to students in the MSPP program. This intensive course will provide students with: 

• An understanding of basic statistics principles 
• Familiarity with Stata
• Experience manipulating data and reading outputs in different formats 
• A working knowledge of basic microeconomics concepts 

This course is pass/fail.

Reforming education policy and finance are at the center of intense debates at all levels of government, driven in part by the recognition of the central role that education plays in the economy. Education affects the productivity of the labor force, the distribution of income, economic growth, and individuals’ earnings and quality of life. This course uses economic principles to analyze K-12 education. The course begins with an examination of the demand for education, both by the private sector (particularly individuals) and the public sector.

Multiple regression is the core statistical technique used by policy and finance analysts in their work. In this course, you will learn how to use and interpret this critical statistical technique. Specifically you will learn how to evaluate whether regression coefficients are biased, whether standard errors (and thus t statistics) are valid, and whether regressions used in policy and finance studies support causal arguments.

Elections In Action is for those that are interested in learning how a campaign works from start to finish. Whether one is working a local to national campaign the structure is still the same. This seven-session course will provide an overview and training in modern day campaign planning and implementation all the way from preparing as a candidate, staff roles, media, fundraising and Get Out the Vote strategies.

Couples with CAP-GP.3149.

The purpose of this 5-session workshop is to equip students with the basic foundations necessary to leverage the Python programming language and Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) in a public policy setting. As such, this course will cover variables, dictionaries, lists, loops, functions, and other concepts required to interact with a RESTful API.

In 2016, the United Nations Secretary General noted in the World Humanitarian Summit Outcome Report that, “Armed conflicts and other violent situations, disasters caused by natural hazards and the impacts of climate change, health threats, soaring inequality and increased fragility marked by extreme poverty and weak institutions are among the factors contributing to the unprecedented spike in humanitarian needs.” In 2020, the world was further destabilized by the Covid-19 global pandemic leaving the humanitarian sector further extended and in desperate need of a radical rethink.

This workshop provides participants with the fundamental steps of how to plan and implement transformation initiatives using the PMP methodology and best practices. Project Management forms the basis for effectively delivering improvements to business processes, deploying new technologies, transformation using data and metrics and communicating change management.

Effective development, planning execution and communication of special projects are critical to all types of public service organizations. Service organization, health providers, nonprofits and government organizations constantly pursue new initiatives and projects to address the demands of their constantly changing environment. This course offers an introduction to the basic concepts and methods for directing projects and provides students with tools that prepare them for success as a project manager. 

This course introduces the theory and practice of institutional reform in developing and transitional countries. It reviews the evolution of international development paradigms, examining how the role, structure, and management of institutions, the public sector, and non-governmental organizations have changed in response to shifting economic and political trends, with a particular emphasis on accountability. The focus is on major institutional and managerial reforms intended to promote good governance as less developed economies liberalize and their societies democratize.

Capital is but a tool – one that can be used for many different purposes. This course explores the use of finance as a tool for social change.

In the US, Health is a privilege, not a right. Approaches to health in this country have focused on treatment and cures, rather than prevention and care. Studies have shown that your zip code, where you live, matters more to your health than your genetic code. Concurrently, data continues to emerge that trauma, and the effects of trauma, can be passed through our genes, from generation to generation, suggesting that enslavement, forced displacement, and poverty of our ancestors are felt in our bones, today.

This class will utilize a hands-on and practical approach to understanding reproductive healthcare in the context of policy and management. Students will have the opportunity to think through real-world case studies and engage with relevant reproductive healthcare topics. Such topics include contraception, abortion, forced sterilization, abuses of power, gender, and gender identity.

Open only to students in the MSPP program. Students will learn the fundamentals of budgeting and accounting for public, health, and nonprofit organizations. Through readings, lectures, real-world case studies, and assignments, students will gain an understanding of how to use financial information in organizational planning, implementation, control, reporting, and analysis. In addition, students will have the chance to develop their spreadsheet skills by using Excel to perform financial calculations and create financial documents.

Continuation of CAP-GP.3601.

In the coming decades, water will be the central issue in global economic development and health.  With one in six people around the world currently lacking access to safe drinking water (1.2 billion people), and more than two out of six lacking adequate sanitation (2.6 billion people), water is already a critical factor affecting the social and economic well-being of a sizable proportion of the world's population.  However, with the world's population projected to double in over the next fifty years, and with rapidly dwindling water supplies becoming both more scarce and more vol

Couples with CAP-GP.3302

As part of the core curriculum of the NYU Wagner Masters program, Capstone teams spend an academic year addressing challenges and identifying opportunities for a client organization or working on a pre-approved, team-generated project in which they develop a business case or prototype to create social impact or launch a social enterprise.

Standard economic theory assumes that individuals are fully rational decision-makers; however, that is often not the case in the real world. Behavioral economics uses findings from lab and field experiments to advance existing economic models by identifying ways in which individuals are systematically irrational. This course gives an overview of key insights from behavioral science and identifies ways in which these findings have been used to advance policies on education, health, energy, taxation, and more.

Open only to students in the MSPP program. Communication Skills for Policy Analysts is a seminar course that simulates a fast-paced public policy environment where different stakeholders require a constant flow of written and oral communication work products. Each work product assignment will be treated as a case with a specific audience, background information and real-world situation and will require outside research and collaboration. MS in Public Policy students will draw on knowledge and techniques being learned in their other Fall coursework.

Open only to students in the MSPP program. The goal of this course is to provide students with an introduction to key methods of quantitative policy analysis. We develop the statistical toolkit of regression analysis, reviewing the bivariate regression model and then continuing with multiple regression, and explore how these methods are applied to policy analysis in five benchmark techniques: randomized trials, direct regression analysis, instrumental variables, regression discontinuity, and difference in differences.

The goal of this course is to provide students with an introduction to advanced empirical methods. We begin by discussing a framework for causal inference and how randomized controlled trials provide a simple and powerful template for thinking about causal questions. We then develop a sequence of advanced empirical methods as alternatives to randomized trials, in settings where experiments are infeasible or not desirable. In particular we discuss regression discontinuity, matching methods, difference-in-differences and panel data, and instrumental variables.

The politics of immigration and immigration policy seem more critical now than ever.  Public debates about immigration have roiled nations around the world, and disagreements about how immigration should be regulated, who should have the right to migrate, what political rights immigrants should have once they cross a border, and how immigrants should participate in the economy have strained political alliances and upended norms of political discourse.  In some cases, conflicts over immigration debates have been used to justify the overhaul of political institutions.  However,

Required for doctoral students.