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 this core course in financial management, 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.

The NYU Impact Investment Fund (NIIF) is a unique inter-disciplinary, experiential learning course that exposes students to the work of an early-stage impact investor, from crafting an investment thesis to sourcing companies, performing due diligence, and ultimately executing an investment.

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 course is about the process of scoping and planning public sector investment projects and the basic knowledge and skills required for their financial and economic appraisal (‘ex-ante’ evaluation).

The focus is on urban infrastructure projects identified, prioritized, and appraised through local/municipal planning processes. Case studies include water supply and sewerage, urban transport, solid waste management and green infrastructure.

This course will explore the public realm in New York City -- with a focus on libraries, parks and streets. It will consider how these components of our infrastructure were first built and how we maintain, manage and, in particular, share these spaces today. The course will look at how the City and other stakeholders balance competing demands, how conflicts over access to these public places have been resolved, and what larger issues are at play in these dialogues.

The field of urban economics addresses a wide variety of questions and topics. At the most general level, the field introduces space into economic models and studies the location of economic activity. Urban economics typically addresses four sets of questions, and this course is organized around these four areas. The first set of questions focuses on the development of urban areas. Why do cities exist and why do some grow more rapidly? How can local governments encourage such growth? The second set of questions addresses patterns of development within metropolitan areas.

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

Students will learn the fundamentals of web development with HTML, CSS, and Javascript, and github.   Using Free and Open Source Spatial Data tools, students will learn to bring their maps to life on the web as interactive experiences.  Use tools like QGIS, CartoDB and PostGIS.  Final project will be an interactive web map around an Urban topic of your choosing.

Building on HPAM-GP.4830, this course examines US domestic health policy issues from an economics perspective. Topics covered will be influenced by the current policy topics under discussion in the US. We will focus on the tradeoffs and contrasts between a market-based versus a government-based system, with topics potentially including: choice and behavioral economics, payment policies/pay-for-performance, health insurance, relevant sectors of the US health care system (hospitals, etc), public health and innovation.

The NYU Impact Investment Fund (NIIF) is a unique inter-disciplinary, experiential learning course that exposes students to the work of an early-stage impact investor, from crafting an investment thesis to sourcing companies, performing due diligence, and ultimately executing an investment.

This course examines historic and contemporary patterns of racial and ethnic stratification often found at the center of disputes concerning urban development, the allocation of city resources and unequal distributions of power. Also embedded throughout the course are ongoing analyses of the ways in which structural inequalities often function in class and gender-specific ways.

Leading large healthcare delivery organizations in today's dynamic landscape demands exceptional strategic agility from managers. Navigating economic challenges, a mobile workforce, the emergence of AI, and increasingly more discerning healthcare consumer, require leaders to not just adapt, but to drive change and deliver results. This course will  explore the various market forces that are at play for today's healthcare executive and how those elements are changing the calculus for organizations to be successful at executing its mission and vision.

The goal of the course is to help students get the most out of every form of communication: to change minds with the written word, win allies in person, to sway audiences in presentations, and to get what they want out of the various forms of communication most common in the careers of recent NYU Wagner graduates.  Students will work both individually and collaboratively on a series of communications deliverables including: 1) Issue Briefs; 2) Memos; 3) Oral Presentations; 4) Press Releases; 5) Talking Points; 6) one-pagers; 7) Podcast; 7) A short video; and 8) A final unified campaign

This course provides an introduction to the impact investing landscape and its evolution, players, and tools. After situating impact investing vis à vis both other forms of investing and other social change tools, we explore what makes an investment impactful - and how one would go about determining that and measuring it. Through a combination of readings, case studies, class discussion, and projects, students will gain deep insight into the perspective of the impact investor and consider how it relates to other stakeholders and to social change writ large.

This course is appropriate for students interested in the role that leadership plays in advancing social innovation and social change in the context of democratic governance.

This course examines historic and contemporary patterns of racial and ethnic stratification often found at the center of disputes concerning urban development, the allocation of city resources and unequal distributions of power. Also embedded throughout the course are ongoing analyses of the ways in which structural inequalities often function in class and gender-specific ways.

This course explores the political and economic policy issues surrounding hunger and food security, drawing on many case examples. The course will provide an overview of some of the core dimensions of global hunger and food security policy issues, including debates over reconfiguring food systems to address health, equity, and sustainability; a new green revolution; food aid; fair trade, and role of the food system in addressing climate change.

This course will offer an introduction to transportation planning, including both theoretical and practical approaches.  This course will provide an understanding of the evolution and role of urban public transportation modes, systems and services.  Additional topics will be introduced, depending upon speaker availability. Subjects in general will include characteristics of different modes (rail, bus, air), scheduling, budgeting, Federal grants, modeling, route design considerations, transit oriented development, public involvement, and project development.

This course provides students with a rich sense of the institutional and political context within which policy is made and implemented. The course aims to give students exposure to important ongoing debates in international development and their historical context. The class will provide an overview of some of the major contemporary analytical and policy debates regarding the politics of development.

This course focuses on the three sets of key questions: (1) mission and vision ("What areas or activities should we be working in?"); (2) strategy and operations ("How can we perform effectively in this area?"); and (3) leadership (“What leadership skills are needed to develop and implement strategies effectively?”).  We will cover both strategy formulation ("What should our strategy be?") and strategy implementation ("What do we need to do to make this strategy work?"). 

How does someone go about changing the world? What does social change theory suggest are the most effective tactics to change hearts and minds? What can we learn from the past about what it means to be an effective agent of change? How have social entrepreneurs created organizations that become engines of change? How has technology, social media and trends in mainstream media changed the rules of the game?  

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, using the software package, Stata.

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.