Education

Update on Game Theory Teaching

Zachary Bartsch2 Comments

I wrote at the end of the summer about some changes that I would make to my Game Theory course. You can go back and read the post. Here, I’m going to evaluate the effectiveness of the changes.

First, some history.

I’ve taught GT a total of 5 time. Below are my average student course evaluations for “I would recommend this class to others” and “I would consider this instructor excellent”. Although the general trend has been improvement, improving ratings and the course along the way, some more context would be helpful. In 2019, my expectations for math were too high. Shame on me. It was also my first time teaching GT, so I had a shaky start. In 2020, I smoothed out a lot of the wrinkles, but I hadn’t yet made it a great class. 

In 2021, I had a stellar crop of students. There was not a single student who failed to learn. The class dynamic was perfect and I administered the course even more smoothly. They were comfortable with one another, and we applied the ideas openly. In 2022, things went south. There were too many students enrolled in the section, too many students who weren’t prepared for the course, and too many students who skated by without learning the content. Finally, in 2023, the year of my changes, I had a small class with a nice symmetrical set of student abilities.  

Historically, I would often advertise this class, but after the disappointing 2022 performance, and given that I knew that I would be making changes, I didn’t advertise for the 2023 section. That part worked out perfectly. Clearly, there is a lot of random stuff that happens that I can’t control. But, my job is to get students to learn, help the capable students to excel, and to not make students *too* miserable in the process – no matter who is sitting in front of me.

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Cool the Schools

James BaileyLeave a comment

Short post today because I’m busy watching my kids, who had their school canceled because of excessive heat, like many schools in Rhode Island today.

I thought this was a ridiculous decision until my son told me he heard from his teacher that his elementary school is the only one in town that has air conditioning for every classroom. Given that, the decision to cancel given the circumstances is at least reasonable, but the lack of AC is not.

It’s not just that hot classrooms are unpleasant for students and staff, or that sudden cancellations like this are a major burden for parents. Several economics papers have found that air conditioning significantly improves students’ learning as measured by test scores (though some find not). Park et al. (2020 AEJ: EP) find that:

Student fixed effects models using 10 million students who retook the PSATs show that hotter school days in the years before the test was taken reduce scores, with extreme heat being particularly damaging. Weekend and summer temperatures have little impact, suggesting heat directly disrupts learning time. New nationwide, school-level measures of air conditioning penetration suggest patterns consistent with such infrastructure largely offsetting heat’s effects. Without air conditioning, a 1°F hotter school year reduces that year’s learning by 1 percent.

This can actually be a bigger issue in somewhat Northern places like Rhode Island- we’re South enough to get some quite hot days, but North enough that AC is not ubiquitous. Data from the Park paper shows that New York and New England are actually some of the worst places for hot schools:

This is because of the lack of AC in the North:

The days are only getting hotter…. it’s time to cool the schools.

Confronting my Macroeconomics Professor

Joy BuchananLeave a comment

I’m gearing up to teach macroeconomics for the first time. The following is a story that I will keep in mind as I work to make technical material relevant to undergraduates.

Years ago, I was an undergraduate sitting in a macroeconomics class. As it happened, I was in an intermediate-level macro class with no relevant background or context for the material. (If I had taken principles-level econ, then maybe I wouldn’t have been in this situation.)

My instructor was grinding through theory in a methodical way. By the end of the first month, as I remember it, we had covered the short run and the medium-term effects of monetary policy.

For anyone who is not familiar, see these MRU videos on shifting the aggregate supply curve.

“The Short-Run Aggregate Supply Curve“

“Office Hours: Using the AD-AS Model“

In summary, the government can inject money into the economy to achieve a short-term increase in output. For a short amount of time, you can help, and that seemed good to me. I had signed up for the course to understand how to reduce poverty and make the world better. I was acing the exams. Things were going well at first.

Then we got bad news. Increasing the money supply does not work for long. Consumers realize that everything is more expensive, so they cut back on real spending. The economy shifts back to where it was before. Nothing actually improves. I had spent a month of my life on this class and we were getting nowhere.

After the lecture on returning to the long-run aggregate supply curve, I went up to the professor after class. I asked him what was going on and when would we learn something that matters. (I was polite. I realized I was going to sound dumb to him, but life is short. I needed to know if this class was going to deliver anything.)

He looked at me, surely confused that I was unsatisfied with the standard progression of material in his course. Then he explained, “Oh. You are talking about the long term, and we will get to that next month.” That’s what I needed. I did not drop the course or the major. I’m an economics professor today because I didn’t mind looking like an idiot if I could get my questions answered.

This story helps me remember what it was like to be an undergrad in an economics class. Tyler says “context is that which is scarce.” Economics teachers need to do two things at once: present technical material and provide context. I will try to get that mix right going forward.

Note to students: Students, don’t be afraid to ask stupid questions. This is your chance. A good teacher will be glad you took the initiative. However, if the question occurs to you right in the middle of a lecture, then it may or may not be the appropriate time for the lecturer to stop and have a conversation with you. Teachers will be most amenable to having a deep conversation after class or during office hours.

My macro-related research:

Published paper: “If Wages Fell During a Recession” YouTube video presentation of this paper from minute 19:00-32:00.

Working paper (no draft yet): “Sticky Prices as Coordination Failure: An Experimental Investigation”

Everyone Happy? Student Loan Repayment

Zachary Bartsch3 Comments

I like a good lump sum tax. People *must* pay the tax without exception and the advantage over current progressive marginal income taxes is that the marginal wage received doesn’t fall with greater earnings. Employment rises and output rises. To the extent that college students fail to understand their student loans, the indebted graduates essentially pay a lump sum tax each period.

Of course, the exception is income based repayment (IBR) – especially with forgiveness after X years. IBR adjusts the incentives substantially. Under the standard system, your wages are garnished if you fail to make loan payments. Under IBR, lower earnings trigger lower monthly payments. Clearly, in contrast to the standard method, IBR incentivizes more leisure, less income, more black market activity, and higher loan balances. Indeed, all the more so if there is a forgiveness horizon. Someone just has to have low enough income for say 15 years, and their past debt is forgiven (with caveats & conditions).

My principal objection to IBR policy is the resulting malinvestment in human capital. Defaulting on loans is a sign that some investment was inadequately productive to repay the resources consumed by its endeavor. We call that a loss. Real resources of time, attention, and goods and services were consumed in order to produce capital that failed to serve others more than the opportunity cost of those resources.

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5 Game Theory Course Changes

Zachary Bartsch1 Comment

I want to share some changes that I’ll make to my game theory course, just for the record. It’s an intense course for students. They complete homeworks, midterm exams, they present scholarly articles to the class, and they write and present a term paper that includes many parts. Students have the potential to learn a huge amount, including those more intangible communication skills for which firms pine.

There is a great deal of freedom in the course. Students model circumstances that they choose for the homeworks, and they write the paper on a topic that they choose. The 2nd half of the course is mathematically intensive. When I’ve got a great batch of students, they achieve amazing things. They build models, they ask questions, they work together. BUT, when the students are academically below average, the course much less fun (for them and me). We spend way more time on math and way less time on the theory and why the math works or on the applicable circumstances. All of that time spent and they still can’t perform on the mathematical assignments. To boot, their analytical production suffers because of all that low marginal product time invested in math. It’s a frustrating experience for them, for me, and for the students who are capable of more.

This year, I’m making a few changes that I want to share.

  1. Minimal Understanding Quizzes: All students must complete a weekly quiz for no credit and earn beyond a threshold score in order to proceed to the homework and exams. I’m hoping to stop the coasters from getting ‘too far’ in the course without getting the basics down well enough. The quizzes must strike the balance of being hard enough that students must know the content, and easy enough that they don’t resent the requirement.
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5 Easy Steps to Improve Your Course Evals.

Zachary Bartsch2 Comments

Incentives matter. I’ve taught at both public and private universities, and students have given me both great course evaluations and less great student evaluations. The private university cared a lot more about them. Obviously, some parts of student evaluations of their instructors are beyond the instructor’s control. The instructor can’t control inalienables and may not be able to change their charisma. But what about the things that instructors can control? Regardless of your current evals, here are 5 policies that are guaranteed to improve your course evaluations.

1: Very Clear Expectations/Schedule

Have all deadlines determined by the time that the semester starts. Students are busy people and they appreciate the ability to optimally plan their time. Relatedly, students desire respect from their instructor. Having clear rubrics and deadlines helps students know your expectations and how to meet them – or at least understand how they failed to meet them. Students want to feel like they were told the rules of the game ahead of time. This means no arbitrary deductions or deadlines. The syllabus is a contract if you treat it like one.

2: Mid-Semester Evaluations

One of the absolute best ways to improve your evaluation is to ask your evaluators for a performance update. Make a copy of your end-of-semester course evaluation and issue it about halfway through the semester. Then, summarize the feedback and review it with your class. This achieves three goals. (1) It is an opportunity to clarify policy if there are misplaced complaints. You may also wish to explain why policy is what it is. Knowing a good reason makes students more amenable to policies that they otherwise don’t prefer.  (2) It provides voice to students who have things to say. Often, students want to be heard and acknowledged. It’s better that a student vents during the informal mid-semester survey than on the important one at the conclusion of the course. (3) If there are widespread issues with your course, then make changes. If you’re on the fence about something, then take a poll. And if you decide to make changes, then be graciously upfront about it. Unexplained or covert changes violate policy #1.

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Easy FRED Stata Data

Zachary Bartsch1 Comment

Lot’s of economists use FRED – that’s Federal Reserve Economic Data for the uninitiated. It’s super easy to use for basic queries, data transformations, graphs, and even maps. Downloading a single data series or even the same series for multiple geographic locations is also easy. But downloading distinct data series can be a hassle.

I’ve written previously about how the Excel add-on makes getting data more convenient. One of the problems with the Excel add-on is that locating the appropriate series can be difficult – I recommend using the FRED website to query data and then use the Excel add-on to obtain it. One major flaw is how the data is formatted in excel. A separate column of dates is downloaded for each series and the same dates aren’t aligned with one another. Further, re-downloading the data with small changes is almost impossible.

Only recently have I realized that there is an alternative that is better still! Stata has access to the FRED API and can import data sets directly in to its memory. There are no redundant date variables and the observations are all aligned by date.

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Basic Immigration Logic

Zachary Bartsch2 Comments

Economists overwhelmingly favor looser immigration controls. Allowing people to immigrate would improve the allocation of scarce labor and capital and it is a far cheaper way to aid poorer families than sending direct payments or trying to develop an entire country. Let’s cover some static analysis basics for migrating workers and their dependents.

Workers, Labor Markets, & Output Markets

There are two markets to consider: The new home country and the old home country. If workers leave the old country in search of the higher wages in the new country, then world employment remains unchanged. Employment obviously rises in the new country and falls in the old country. With identical laborers (a terrible assumption that’s the least charitable to immigration), wages in the new country fall and wages in the old country rise. This logic illustrates the cheap aid of which economists are fond.

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Is College Enrollment Falling?

Jeremy Horpedahl2 Comments

A recent Wall Street Journal declares “More High-School Grads Forgo College in Hot Labor Market.” An accompanying chart and data show the apparent plunge, with just 62% of recent high school grads enrolled in college, down from 66.2% before the pandemic, and well down from the high in 2009 of 70.1%.

The article recites the usual reasons. The high and increasing financial cost of attending college. The increasing opportunity cost due to the “hot labor market” mentioned in the headline. Large numbers of young people getting apprenticeships: apparently a 50% increase over some unstated timeframe!

They give anecdotes. A 21-year-old male in Maryland was put off by the high cost of a four-year degree. He likes working on cars, so instead got a job as a service technician at a Toyota dealership.

We’ve heard this all before. In fact, we know we’ve heard it before, because the WSJ article links to other WSJ articles saying the same thing over the past few years.

But are young people really skipping traditional four-year colleges for other opportunities? The answer is a big fat No. And we can even use the same data the WSJ used (from the CPS) to prove it, but slice it more finely. The percent of recent high school graduates enrolled in 4-year colleges and universities in 2022 was 45.1%. That’s slightly higher than 2019 (44.4%) and is, in fact, the second highest level ever in this data, with only 2016 being higher at 46%.

So what gives? The decline that the WSJ is reporting is entirely driven by a decline in enrollment at 2-year colleges, though you would never get a hint of that in the article. You might even think it was the opposite: perhaps young people are forgoing 4-year colleges in favor of trade schools! Nope. Here’s the data.

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