Courses

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”).

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.

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.

This course will involve programming, some experience is preferred but not required. Contact the instructor for introductory coding resources to review before class.   Personal Laptops are required.

The past decade has seen the increasing availability of very large scale data sets, arising from the rapid growth of transformative technologies such as the Internet and cellular telephones, along with the development of new and powerful computational methods to analyze such datasets. Such methods, developed in the closely related fields of machine learning, data mining, and artificial intelligence, provide a powerful set of tools for intelligent problem-solving and data-driven policy analysis.

This class explores the important evaluation area of policy advocacy evaluation. As development practice shifts to focus on the structural drivers of poverty around the world, and seek long-term social and institutional change, interventions increasingly involve shaping policies, programs and social norms. This class examines the theoretical and practical challenges of measuring influence on policy deliberation and implementation. It explores emerging approaches developed to provide rigor and actionable insights about what works and what doesn’t.

This interactive workshop serves as an introduction to the many NYU Libraries resources and services available to Wagner students that will help students develop skills appropriate to graduate-level research. In the session, we will cover fundamental research strategies that will prepare students for course assignments and Capstone projects.

This course explores the political and economic policy issues surrounding hunger and food security, drawing on many case examples and using Ghana as a case study. The course will provide an overview of some of the core dimensions of global hunger and food security policy issues, including debates over a new green revolution, food aid, fair trade, the impact of expanded biofuels production and the impact of the inter-related financial, food, and fuel crises.

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.

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.

The primary purpose of the microeconomics core course is to enable you to use microeconomic thinking, concepts and tools in your professional public service work. Accomplishing this also requires refreshing and strengthening your quantitative skills.

This course, "City Streets and Urban Landscapes," will immerse students in a study of established and emerging urban design priorities for city streets. Streets and sidewalks operate as the most public of our city’s public spaces, at once forming connective tissue between different locations while also creating borders and boundaries.

Whether as an action agency or a source of analysis or raw material, the intelligence community is a key but little understood participant in the policymaking cycle. This course introduces students to the contemporary intelligence community and its role in shaping US national security policy, providing students with a hands-on appreciation of the role of intelligence through participation in class simulations of case studies of national security policymaking. 

The course focuses on economic inequality and poverty, drawing on research in economics and other social sciences. The aim is to explore research questions, recent empirical approaches, and policy responses. The course draws on international experiences, with a tilt toward the United States, and an emphasis on framing problems comparatively.

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. 

This is an introductory course for students who want to better understand theories, principles, and methods of community-based participatory action research (CBPAR), which is research done with communities and community partners. CBPAR is a means for community planning and organizing to address local issues and social needs that center individuals and communities directly impacted.

This course will show students of community organizing how to use bargaining as an effective tool of collective power.  We will review the basics of community organizing and then focus on how bargaining works as both the product of power and as a means to build power for groups. We will look first at union negotiations and then at bargaining as a community organization. 

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.