Courses

This course will explore the fault lines within the field of philanthropy and prepare students to effectively leverage resources for their organizations. The course will examine different approaches to grantmaking including: social entrepreneurship, effective altruism, venture philanthropy, social justice grantmaking, and strategic philanthropy.  Students will learn the differences across these conceptual frameworks and understand how they influence the ways in which foundations establish goals, develop strategies, evaluate grantees, and determine grant awards.

We enter any subject of investigation filled with learned viewpoints, opinions, and select facts that we choose to employ. This helps to make the task of uncovering what we mean by Jewish and Jewish community fraught with unusual difficulty. Whatever our background, it will be hard to shake preconceived positions. In addition, the Jewish community seeks to nurture purely voluntary association at a time of little support in the popular culture for sustaining communal norms, existing institutions or unenforceable obligations.

An understanding of government budgeting is critical to understanding the policy process and the workings of government. This course covers the theory and practice of government budgeting at both the national and subnational levels. It reviews how governments raise revenue, the process and procedures by which they allocate funds, and the various budgetary institutions that shape fiscal outcomes.

This course builds on the material from the core Financial Management class to further develop skills in managerial and financial accounting. The course covers the recording process (journal entries, T-accounts, adjusting entries, and closing entries), financial statement modeling, and financial statement analysis. In addition, students will learn more about for-profit accounting and corporate structure, as well as how financial management differs across the government, not-for-profit, and for-profit sectors.

This short course will explore the concept of accountability within humanitarian intervention. In particular it will look at the contemporary significance of accountability for humanitarian response – when and why it has become an important concept for humanitarian intervention, and specific events that have led to a shift from donors to recipients of aid as the agents of accountability. 

 

Key questions that will be explored include:  

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.

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.

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 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 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.

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.

Open only to students in the MSPP program. This course provides MS in Public Policy students with an overview of contemporary public management. We review important intellectual and constitutional foundations of the administrative state and construct a theoretical approach to the study and practice of public management. A major objective of the course is to develop skills in critical analysis necessary for practice.

Open only to students in the MSPP program. This course provides MS in Public Policy students with an overview of contemporary public management. We review important management and leadership concepts that are required to approach public management. The course will focus on specific problems that leaders may face and tools that you can use. A major objective of the course is to develop skills in critical analysis necessary for practice.

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.

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.

This second course in the Housing and Community Development sequence expands upon the foundational understanding of housing and community development policy by focusing on how key policy drivers, the current political and social moment, and core stakeholders are likely to create and/or limit opportunities moving forward. The course will examine the ways that particularly housing policy does and does not change, and what influences such changes.

Affordable housing that's 40% less expensive to build. Three times as many soup kitchen clients served each hour. Hospital ER wait time cut by 90%. This is the type of impact social innovators aspire to achieve by applying the method called "Lean."

This course examines the process by which financing objectives are transformed into municipal bond transactions and other opportunities to utilize structured finance products in the health and corporate finance sectors. The course will center on a case study of an actual bond transaction that financed multiple new money (construction) and refunding projects. We will learn the mathematics underlying financial structure and the governing conventions and vocabulary of structured finance. We will study the instruments of structured finance and how they manifest into structural form.

This 0-credit workshop will drill down on fundamentals of written English. We will cover punctuation, articles, passive/active voice, how and when to cite others’ work and best practices for self editing. Our focus will be on memos, but the lessons will be applicable to all written communications deliverables. Using short in class assignments and a memo you could possibly use in another class, the course is geared toward Wagner students who want to improve sentence mechanics.

The consequences of disastrous events are escalating globally in terms of lives lost, injuries, adverse social conditions, economic costs, and environmental destruction. Furthermore, the rapidity of action required when an emergency arises poses unique challenges to traditional planning and the provision of public services.

This course, “Urban Design— Visualization Tools & Neighborhood Challenges,” will introduce students to visualization techniques in a series of linked exercises during the first half of the semester; in the second half of the semester, students will further develop these visualization and design tools as they address challenges and opportunities in a rapidly-changing New York City neighborhood. Instructor Joanna Simon will teach the first half of the course while Professor Louise Harpman will teach the second half.

This course, taught jointly by faculty members across the university, offers doctoral students an opportunity to learn about the latest theoretical and empirical research on critical urban issues. The course is not taught in a lecture format. Rather, the colloquium focuses on discussions of academic works in progress by scholars from around the country, working in such disciplines as sociology, history, planning, law, public health, public policy, and economics.