Economist Writing Every Day

In this brief post, I want to commend a few teaching resources that have been helpful over the past few months of teaching.

For teaching students the nuts and bolts of causal inference, the new Mastering Metrics videos with Josh Angrist on Marginal Revolution University are terrific. The causal animations from Nick Huntington-Klein (and other resources) are also very helpful. This app on linear regression from Luke M. Froeb and Keyuan Jiang is a helpful way to help students gain econometric intuition. They have a companion paper to the app on SSRN.

In my intermediate microeconomics class, I remind students that while we are building a corpus of theory to explain human behavior, we must devise tests of those theories because science advances through the interplay of theory and experiment. As I’ve written before, I am a huge fan of classroom experiments and would recommend MobLab for ease of use, quick explainers on the experiments, and immediate access to data and discussion of results. However, if you do not want to have your students pay a subscription fee then VeconLab is nice as well.

There are so many new video series being created around a variety of topics. Beyond the Mastering Metrics videos discussed above (and all the other great MRU content) my friend and coauthor John Lightle has recorded several excellent videos on behavioral economics topics. I’m sure there are many more.

I am a huge fan of blogs as repositories of information when putting together examples for classes. Some of my favorite blogs (present and/or past) include Marginal Revolution, Conversable Economist, Cheap Talk, Mankiw’s Blog, Coordination Problem, Cafe Hayek, Chris Blattman, and EconLog (though I’m sure I have enjoyed many more blogs).

I find myself frequently sending links of EconTalk, Planet Money, and Freakonomics podcasts to students.

I’m always learning about new tools too from folks like Doug McKee at Teach Better and my innovative colleagues. What are your favorite teaching tools? Please leave a comment.