Category: ETH
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QPAM: Investment Appraisal
To perform investment appraisal we need to analyse cost and revenues. First we need to find profitability indicators, then we need to assess the life cycle cost. Then we can perform a cost effectiveness analysis and last we need to also consider dynamics and sensitivities. Profitability Indicators On the cost side we have investment costs,…
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BSTP: Sailships to steamships and Limited Liability.
The move from sail ships to steamships was driven beyond the technological developments by mail delivery (communication) and transportation of people. Sail ships remained a useful resource in heavy cargo with no time limits on delivery and only phased out with increased efficiency of steamships. The opening of global trade looked the world into steamships.…
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BSTP: Industrial Revolution
The topic of today is industrial revolution. Summed up in a phrase the transformation from ” muscle to machine”. Any transformation requires work/energy. Before the industrial revolution people relied on biological matter for work. The rate of energy conversion many orders of magnitude lower than in machines. This limitation extended to human growth potential. Engines…
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CGSS: Introduction
Complexity and Global Systems Science (CGSS) will cover Game Theory and mechanism design, complex network, socio-physics, and critical thinking essays regarding the topic. Complexity science is related to systems that are made up of thousands of units, whereas global systems describe large systems. Systemic instabilities are of a major interest and need to be understood.…
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PIPP: Hierarchies in the Law
In a national legal system there is usually public law (interaction between governments and citizens, e.g. a university awarding a degree to a student) and private law (interaction between citizens, companies in any combination, e.g. a university buying a computer). Private Law is divided into major families are Substantive Law and Commercial Law, whereas Public…
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PIPP: Characteristics of Law
Public Institutions and Policy-making Processes (PIPP) covers three modules: Law, general (Public) Institutions, and European and International Institutions in particular. The first part of the course will be about law. The focus is not on becoming a lawyer, but rather to be able to understand the thought processes behind legal decisions and their implications. Creation…
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Urban Design I: Introduction
The lecture will cover urban development in the following cities Berlin, Sarajevo, Caracas, Athens, Cape Town, New York, Sao Paulo and Detriot. The format to analysis these cities will be Urban Stories, using different tools to understand the process and development in each. Issues and Challenges Housing is a major issue in most urban areas.…
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QPAM: Introduction
Quantitative Policy Analysis and Modelling (QPAM) concerns itself with the goals that we set ourselves for society and how government can obtain these goals. The “Grüne Wirtschaft” initiative currently up for a referendum in Switzerland can be said to have the goal of a sustainable economy by 2050. If accepted it mandates to assess the…
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Principles of Economics: Efficient Competitive Markets
The goal of the lesson is to understand how markets work. We need a benchmark to analyse a market and it will be perfect competition. It is an idealised world where nobody has sufficient market power to influence the market and therefore good prices are exogenous. Also producers are altruistic inasmuch they do not consider…