Courses

This course provides a detailed and rigorous approach to understanding the U.S. economy through practical data analysis. It will prepare students for roles in economic research and analysis. The course will include weekly readings and data exercises, analysis of current economic data releases and news. Guest economists will be invited to contribute to some classes. 

In our increasingly data-reliant and data-saturated society, people who understand how to leverage data to generate insights have the power to change the world. Data visualization and storytelling is a crucial skill for policy and data analysts, communications and marketing professionals, and managers and decision-makers within nonprofits, social organizations and the government. With the advent of visualization tools that do not require coding, data storytelling in the digital age is also an attainable skill set for people with varying levels of technical ability.

This two-day course is designed to develop your ability to build, lead, and participate in high-performing teams. We will draw from the fields of psychology, management, strategy, and sociology to discuss best practices for designing, launching, participating in, and coaching in-person and virtual teams. We will also focus on the benefits and challenges of managing diverse teams, using teams in various contexts (including Capstone teams), understanding and managing conflict, and developing problem-solving techniques for team effectiveness.

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. 

The public/nonprofit administrator, whether primarily concerned with management, policy or finance, is called upon to manage or becomes involved in a wide variety of conflicts. Conflict is ubiquitous - within and between organizations and agencies, between levels of government, between interest groups and government, between interest groups, between citizens and agencies, etc.

This course provides an introduction to the political institutions and processes through which public policy is made and implemented in the United States (although the key concepts are applicable to other political systems as well). The course also introduces students to the tools of policy analysis. The first half of the course presents the major models of policymaking and policy analysis. The second half of the course applies these concepts to specific policy areas such as health, education, and environment, as illustrated by real-world case studies.

This course introduces students to basic statistical methods and their application to management, policy, and financial decision-making. The course covers the essential elements of descriptive statistics, univariate and bivariate statistical inference, and introduces multivariate analysis. In addition to covering statistical theory the course emphasizes applied statistics and data analysis. The primary goal of this course is to introduce these basic skills and encourage a critical approach to reviewing statistical findings and using statistical reasoning in decision making.

Management and Leadership is designed to empower you with the skills you will need to make meaningful change in the world—whether you care about bike lanes, criminal justice, prenatal care, community development, urban planning, social investment, or something else. Whatever your passion, you can have an impact by leading and managing. In this course, you will enhance the technical, interpersonal, conceptual, and political skills needed to run effective and efficient organizations embedded in diverse communities, policy arenas, sectors, and industries.

This is an advanced course for students who plan to become policy analysts.  Students (a) extend their familiarity with methodologic issues, including research designs, measurement problems, and analytic approaches; (b) get hands-on experience with management, analysis, and presentation of data; and (c) develop skills in reading, critiquing, and reporting on policy-relevant research.

Economics—misguided market forces—is at the core of most environmental problems. Economics—guiding market forces in the right direction—is also fundamental to the solution.

In this course we develop some of the fundamental economic tools for environmental policy analysis and management: Economics 101 applied to environmental problems—often, though not exclusively, focused on climate change.

We will also go well beyond that initial Econ 101 take, narrowly defined. In fact, focusing exclusively on Econ 101 may sometimes be positively misleading.

The goal of this course is to develop the key data analytics skill sets necessary to inform evidence-based policy. Its design offers hands-on training in how to make sense of and use large scale real world heterogeneous datasets in the context of addressing real world problems. Students will learn how to scope a policy problem, understand the data generation process, how to manage, combine, and structure data, and how to create, measure and analyze the effect of different data decisions.

All public and nonprofit organizations must assemble and report information on their performance. The need for performance measures goes beyond legal and regulatory requirements. To provide services effectively and efficiently, managers need information to make decisions. This course focuses on what performance measures are needed, how they should be created and what forms of communication are most effective.

All public and nonprofit organizations must assemble and report information on their performance. The need for performance measures goes beyond legal and regulatory requirements. To provide services effectively and efficiently, managers need information to make decisions. This course focuses on what performance measures are needed, how they should be created and what forms of communication are most effective.

For better or worse, both affordable housing and renewable energy projects in the US are mostly built and owned by private developers and corporations. These private developers in turn are reliant on private capital provided by investors, corporations and banks. Almost all these investors rely heavily on federal tax credits.  90% of affordable housing in the US receives a subsidy through the low-income housing tax credit (“LIHTC”). Virtually all large-scale wind and solar projects receive tax credit subsides as well (“ITC” or “PTC”).

Scenario planning is a widely used decision-making practice used to find a sure course of action in the face of great uncertainty and difficult challenges. It was first developed at the Rand Institute and refined by the Group Planning team for Royal Dutch/Shell, who used it to anticipate and prepare for the 1970s energy crisis. The practice played a role in the end of apartheid in South Africa, in public health responses to the AIDS crisis in the 1990s, and in the development of modern war-gaming at the military.

This course provides the core microeconomic theories and concepts needed to understand health and health care issues in both the developed and developing world. It describes how the markets for health and health services are different from other goods, with a particular emphasis on the role of government and market failure. In addition it discusses the theoretical and empirical aspects of key health economics issues, including the demand for health and health services, supply side concerns, health insurance, the provision of public goods, and related topics.

Introduction to Public Policy covers a wide range of topics, from the norms and values informing democratic policymaking to the basics of cost-benefit and other tools of policy analysis. Though emphases will differ based on instructor strengths, all sections will address the institutional arrangements for making public policy decisions, the role of various actors-including nonprofit and private-sector professionals-in shaping policy outcomes, and the fundamentals (and limits) of analytic approaches to public policy.

In this course students will learn the fundamentals of financial institutions and markets, along with risk measurement and management. Through readings, lectures, real-world case studies, and assignments, students will gain an understanding of how financial institutions and markets work, the basics of how financial instruments are priced, and then primarily through case studies examine how risk measurement and management failures led to disasters in financial markets, institutions and/or products. 

In this course, students examine the challenges and opportunities of national development. Following Lant Pritchett, we define national development as the lockstep improvement in (i) economic productivity, (ii) political representation, (iii) public sector’s administrative capacity, and (iv) respect for minority rights. In contrast to targeted or piece-meal policy interventions that strive to improve conditions in one sector or alleviate the poverty of a chosen group, the pursuit of national development promises sustained gains to the entire nation.

This course will explore best and evolving practices in the financial management and impact measurement of social enterprises.  The class will be taught from the perspective of the social entrepreneur and social enterprise manager and introduce cases to assess financial challenges, fiscal performance and financing strategy of pioneering firms with a social mission.

This course examines the nature and extent of poverty primarily in the U.S. but with a comparative perspective (developed countries in Europe). To start, this course will focus on how poverty is defined and measured. It will proceed to explore how conceptions of poverty are socially constructed and historically bounded; examine what the causes and consequences of poverty are and discuss how these are complex and interwoven; and show how people can experience poverty at different points in their life course—some groups experiencing poverty more so than others.

The purpose of the course is to deepen students’ understanding of the way in which public policy and political realities interact in American government at the national, state, and local levels: how political pressures limit policy choices, how policy choices in turn reshape politics, and how policymakers can function in the interplay of competing forces. The theme explored is how public officials balance concerns for substantive policy objectives, institutional politics and elective politics in order to achieve change.

Advocacy Lab is for those who could imagine working in national or local advocacy organizations that make change happen or anyone who wants to understand the art of issue advocacy as a theory and method of social change. An advocacy campaign attempts to impact public policy, most often through changes in regulations and/or legislation.

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.