Economics for Teachers: Musings about Teaching Economics

The water contamination issue in West Virginia sounds terrible for those living in the area but it’s a gold mine for econ teachers! In addition to the obvious implications for teaching externalities and regulation, you could also use this Marketplace interview with the owner of a chain of grocery stores as a jumping-off point to talk about price controls and shortages, or demand for complements and substitutes. Mark Maier and I have set up a  site and blog  to accompany our book,  The Data Game: Controversies in Social Science Statistics . In addition to a help page for instructors, we’ll be posting relevant links and examples from current events. If you teach any type of statistics course or other course that uses data, check it out! James Tierney’s site Teach Me Econ has some great ideas for teaching economics. He also does a podcast series about the economics classroom; the most recent is an interview with Eric Chiang , the author of the latest edition of the Cor...

Geez, where the heck is the summer going? I can't believe it's August already! I had planned to have the data course completely prepped by now so that I could spend August working on other things but of course, things never turn out as planned. Thanks to several trips in July, I'm not nearly as prepped as I'd like but I thought I'd share something about what where I'm at. As I mentioned earlier in the summer , this course is not a typical statistics course - it really is a data analysis course. And I'll be teaching it using team-based learning . The TBL website and listserv have been incredibly helpful with that part. When I say that this is more of a data analysis course, I mean that we will talk about things like choosing what to count (e.g., if you want to know how income is distributed across households, how do you define 'income'? Once you settle on a variable, do you look at mean, median, different percentiles?) and how to measure those var...

As I have been developing this data course, I have been trying to keep in mind that this is an economics course, and the focus is supposed to be (as the title of the course states) the Collection and Use of Data in Economics . From a data standpoint, that means exposing students to the types of data that economists use (which is not quite the same thing as 'economic data' but that's a topic for another post). From an analysis standpoint, that means that we have to talk about inference from observational data, issues with identifying causation vs. just correlation, multiple regression, etc. But I think it also means that we need to talk about the larger issue of what types of empirical questions do economists use data for ? I'm planning to start the semester with a discussion of what is, and what isn't, an empirical question, and get the students thinking about what kinds of questions can and can't be answered with data. In economics, we talk about this in ter...

I should clarify something I said last week about how this data and statistics course I'm prepping isn't really a standard course: I do know there are lots of econ departments that offer an economic statistics course that is a step below econometrics. I guess what I was thinking is that the intention behind this course was specifically to give students tangible skills working with data, so there is supposed to be a heavy emphasis on finding and accessing economic data and using Excel to manipulate that data, rather than on formulas and statistical theory (which students presumably should have already had anyway, in a lower-division required statistics course). But my impression is that a lot of econ statistics courses for majors at other schools are really more stats courses, just with econ-related examples*. The interesting thing is that the Siegfried, et al, report ("The Status and Prospects of the Economics Major, JEE, Summer 1991) discusses this very situation (emph...

After a few weeks of catching up on referee reports and other projects that I should have done a long time ago but ignored because of classes, plus simply some much-needed piddling, I'm back in the teaching saddle and starting to design the new course I'll be teaching in the fall. Most economists (and, I assume, many other University professors) rarely actually purposely design courses. That is, a lot of professors start out as teaching assistants during graduate school, which usually means we just do whatever the professor we're working for tells us to do. When we move on to teaching our own classes, if it's a course for which we T.A.'ed, then we just follow whatever the professor we worked for did in that course. If it's a new course, we find other people who have taught the course and ask them for help, which amounts to getting their syllabus and maybe old assignments and exams. Once in a blue moon, someone might develop a course that hasn't really be...