Course

This graduate-level seminar provides a space for students to engage with theories and research that demonstrate how public policy can be grounded in equity and social justice.

This is a new experiential learning course that explores the following questions and facilitates the building of skills to answer them:

• How do policymakers use research and “evidence” in their jobs?
• How can researchers make their work useful to policymakers?
• How can legislative support staff and other stakeholders use research and evidence to help shape policy?

The purpose of this seminar is to explore the public policy and politics of international finance.  We will focus, in particular, on the ways in which the globalization of finance over the last four decades has influenced – and been influenced by – politics, institutions, and policymaking processes at both the domestic and international levels.

This course will discuss the history of global income disparities and development policy, consider case studies of successful and unsuccessful aid projects, and look at the effectiveness of various policies, such as family planning programs, infrastructure development projects, human capital interventions, conditional cash transfers, property rights reforms, and the alleviation of credit constraints.

This course provides an overview of program evaluation, the practice of assessing the efficacy of policy initiatives, with an emphasis on international applications. A primary concern when evaluating a program is ensuring that estimates reflect the causal impact of the program, so we will discuss various strategies for addressing this challenge, including: randomized clinical trials, fixed effects, pre-post designs, difference-in-differences, instrumental variables, regression discontinuity, and propensity score matching.

This course focuses on the skills and knowledge necessary to lead organizations successfully. Students will explore their own leadership strengths, effective management approaches, and strategies that create work environments that are diverse, equitable, and inclusive.

In this seminar we will focus on a number of important and pressing areas of state governmental policy, including health care, early childhood and K-12 education, higher education, the environment and energy, economic development, budget and taxes, criminal and juvenile justice and poverty.

This course is designed to teach students how utility rates are set.