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Course description

At a time when geopolitical and geoeconomic risks are increasingly front and center, "Nation Branding, Risk, and Global Investing" equips students with a comprehensive framework for evaluating these risks and enabling more informed business and investment decisions. The course covers strategies employed by governments and companies to mitigate or market around these risks through national brand management—targeted messaging for investors, tourists, the global press, bondholders, multinationals, international watchdog NGOs, and domestic populations. We will examine what is emphasized, spun, or concealed, alongside the how and why. Another key component is exploring how stereotypes, preconceptions, groupthink, propaganda, and polarization undermine objectivity in risk perceptions, complicating decision-making. This knowledge is vital for careers in international business, investment, entrepreneurship, tourism, consulting, and for future marketers and politicians who may incorporate place branding into their own products, enterprises, or platforms.

Argentina and Brazil

The course culminates in a trip to one of Latin America’s most successful economies, and another of its most volatile, where we will meet with senior political, business, and media leaders.

 

 

Faculty Bio

Daniel Lansberg-Rodriguez is a founding partner at Aurora Macro Strategies—a boutique macroeconomic and geopolitical research, intelligence, and advisory firm servicing a select group of financial, commercial and government clients. Having joined the Kellogg Faculty in 2014, his teaching and research focus includes political risk, geopolitics, corruption, country branding, family enterprise in emerging markets, as well as institutional and constitutional development in Latin America.

From 2014-2023 Daniel served as Director for the Latin American region at Greenmantle, a Macroeconomic and Geopolitical Research service advising many of the world’s premier hedge funds. Prior to that, he works as division chief for entrepreneurial development at the Sucre Municipal Government in Caracas from 2009-2010, following other local stints in the Venezuelan public and NGO sector. Other past work experience likewise includes Goldman Sachs, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.

Daniel frequently appears as an analyst in international media, where he is a frequent guest on CNN, France24, NTN24, Al Jazeera, and NPR. He was a regular political columnist for the Venezuelan broadsheet El Nacional (2012-2018) as well as a frequent contributor to Foreign Policy Magazine, the Financial Times, The Atlantic and the New York Times. He has also written for Forbes, the New Republic, the New Yorker, Harpers, the Washington Post, the Economist, Boston Review and the Los Angeles Review of Books (among others). His academic publications include articles in the UCLA Law Review and the Georgetown Journal of International Affairs among others.

He has taught courses at Harvard University, and guest lectured at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, New York University Stern School of Business, the United States Airforce Academy, and IESA Business School in Caracas.

Concurrent to his current private sector and academic roles, Daniel has been invited to brief various international governments and U.S. government agencies on his views including the U.S. State Department and the Intelligence Services. He has also served as an expert witness or consultant on legal cases involving political corruption and persecution, providing testimony before U.S. Federal, State, and Immigration courts.

Daniel holds a B.A. cum laude from Carleton College, a J.D. from the University of Chicago, and an M.P.P. from Harvard University with a concentration in International Trade and Finance. Having grown up between South Central Connecticut and Eastern Caracas, he now lives in Newton, Massachusetts, with his wife Marianella and their twin daughters Claudia and Michelle