Teaching Economics: Challenges and Insights

Friday May 14, 2004

300 S. Westnedge Ave.

Kalamazoo, Michigan


Please join us for this one-day conference featuring noted economists who care about how we teach the subject of economics.

Hosted by the Department of Economics, Western Michigan University
With support from
The W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research
Pearson - Prentice Hall
Aplia
McGraw-Hill/Irwin
The Wall Street Journal
Kalamazoo Center for Economic Education, Kalamazoo College


Registration Fee:  $30 includes breakfast, lunch and snacks (fee for students is $20).  Space is limited.
Download Registration Form (Word document)  or web version of Registration Form
Map to Conference location: W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research

Agenda

8:30-9:00

 Registration Registration
9:00-9:15

 Welcome   



9:15-10:00
 Breakfast
The Frustrations (and Joys) of Putting Economics on Video”

 Paul Solman
The Lehrer News Hour
10:15-11:15    "What should we teach students about macroeconomics?”   
Paul Romer,
STANCO 25 Professor of Economics,
the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University and
Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution.
11:30-12:30 "Teaching Introductory Students to Speak Economics" Robert Frank,
Henrietta Johnson Louis Professor of Management and
Professor of Economics at Cornell's Johnson Graduate School of Management.
12:30-1:30 Lunch

1:30-2:15 “The Impact of Requiring a Mathematics Unit in Principles of Macroeconomics: Results of a Controlled Experiment"

 Susan Pozo,
Professor of Economics,
Western Michigan University.
2:30-3:15 “Gender Differences in the Introductory Microeconomics Course” Charles Ballard,
Professor of Economics,
Michigan State University.
3:30-4:30 Demonstration of Classroom Performance System (CPS). 
An interactive response pad for higher education.

 Presented by Edutek.
   



   Speakers

Charles L. Ballard is Professor of Economics at Michigan State University.  He has been on the faculty at MSU since 1983, when he received his Ph.D. from Stanford University.  He has written on the economic effects of income taxes, consumption taxes, tariffs, wage subsidies, credits for health insurance, environmentally motivated taxes, and the tax treatment of foreign-source income.  His research interests also include the determinants of success in introductory economics courses, and the effects of sales taxes on Internet sales.  He has served as a consultant with the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the U.S. Department of Treasury, and with research institutes in Australia, Denmark, and Finland.  His books include A General Equilibrium Model for Tax Policy Evaluation (with Don Fullerton, John B. Shoven, and John Whalley, 1985) Real Economics for Real People (second edition, 2001), and Michigan at the Millennium (co-edited  with Paul N. Courant, Douglas C. Drake, Ronald C. Fisher, and Elisabeth R. Gerber, Michigan State University Press, 2003).  He is the recipient of two Teacher/Scholar awards at Michigan State University.

Robert H. Frank is the Henrietta Johnson Louis Professor of Management and Professor of Economics at Cornell's Johnson Graduate School of Management.  He received his B.S. in mathematics from Georgia Tech in 1966, then taught math and science for two years as a Peace Corps Volunteer in rural Nepal.  He received his M.A. in statistics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1971 and his Ph.D. in economics in 1972, also from U.C. Berkeley.  During leaves of absence from Cornell, he was chief economist for the Civil Aeronautics Board from 1978 to 1980, a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in 1992-93, and the Professor of American Civilization at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris in 2000-2001.  Professor Frank's books, which include Choosing the Right Pond, Passions Within Reason, Microeconomics and Behavior, Principles of Economics (with Ben Bernanke), Luxury Fever, and What Price the Moral High Ground?, have been translated into nine languages. The Winner-Take-All Society, co-authored with Philip Cook, received a Critic's Choice Award, was named a Notable Book of the Year by The New York Times, and was included in Business Week's list of the ten best books of 1995.  He is a co-recipient of the 2003 Leontief Prize for Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Thought.

Susan Pozo is Professor of Economics at Western Michigan University.  She obtained her undergraduate degree from Barnard College in New York City,  and a Ph.D. from Michigan State University in East Lansing, Michigan.  Professor Pozo's current research focuses on the consequences and determinants of workers' remittances.  She has investigated the impacts of remittances on exchange rates, the role of remittances in promoting business investments and educational attainment, the different mechanisms used by immigrants to remit money home,  and how risk and uncertainty affect the volume of international remittances. Professor Pozo has also conducted research on the underground economy, the measurement of currency crises, the statistical distribution of exchange rates and of currency cocktails, the saving behavior of immigrants, and dollarization .  Her papers have appeared in the Review of Economics and Statistics, Journal of International Money and Finance, and World Development, among others.  She has authored or edited 3 books: Exploring the Underground Economy, Price Behavior in Illegal Markets, and Essays on Legal and Illegal Immigration.  Professor Pozo grew up in Asia and Latin America.  She has served on the American Economic Association's  CSWEP board and as an officer of the Midwest Economics Association.

Paul M. Romer is the STANCO 25 Professor of Economics in the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University and a Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution.
Romer was the lead developer of "new growth theory." This body of work, which grew out of Romer's 1983 Ph.D. thesis, provides a better foundation for business and government thinking about the dynamics of wealth creation. It addresses one of the oldest questions in economics: What sustains economic growth in a physical world characterized by diminishing returns and scarcity? It also sheds new light on current economic issues. Among these, Romer is currently studying how government policy affects innovation and how faster technological change might influence asset prices.
Paul Romer was named one of America's 25 most influential people by Time magazine in 1997. He was recently elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2000). He is also a fellow of the Econometric Society and a research associate with the National Bureau of Economic Research. He was also a member of the National Research Council Panel on Criteria for Federal Support of Research and Development (1995), a member of the Executive Council of the American Economics Association, and a fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. Before coming to Stanford, Romer was a professor of economics at the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Chicago.
His papers include "Should the Government Subsidize Supply or Demand in the Market for Scientists and Engineers?" (NBER Working Paper 7723, May 2000); "Growth Cycles," with George Evans and Seppo Honkapojha (American Economic Review, June 1998); "Science, Economic Growth and Public Policy" (in B. Smith and C. Barfield, eds., Technology, R&D, and the Economy, Brookings Institution and American Enterprise Institute, 1996); "Endogenous Technological Change" (Journal of Political Economy, October 1990); and "Increasing Returns and Long Run Growth" (Journal of Political Economy, October 1986). He is also the author of several popular articles describing the role of technology and growth.
Romer holds a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago (1983), and also studied math, physics, and economics at the University of Chicago and MIT. He and his wife, Virginia Langmuir, MD, live in Portola Valley, CA, and have two children.

 Paul Solman is Economics (and occasionally Arts) Correspondent The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer/WGBH
After years in Boston’s alternative press (he was founding editor of the fabled weekly, The Real Paper), PAUL SOLMAN began his career in business journalism on a Nieman Fellowship (1976-7), which he spent as a first-year MBA student at the Harvard Business School. He then became a business reporter for the local news on public television in Boston (WGBH). After spending a few years ('79-'81) as co-originator and executive editor of public broadcasting's business documentary series, Enterprise, he returned to producing and hosting local news and national documentaries. In 1985, Solman became business and economics correspondent for The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer (formerly, The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour). A decade later, he began covering art (and sports) for the program as well.
    Along the way, Solman has won Emmys (in the ’70s, ‘80s and ‘90s) and a Peabody, among other awards, has edited for and consulted to Mother Jones Magazine, and has served on the Harvard Business School faculty, teaching media and finance at the school's Advanced Management Program, where he also developed an interactive all-day simulation of a hostile takeover (“the M&A Game”) that he teaches throughout the world. With writer and public television executive Thomas Friedman, he co-authored a much-better-than-average-seller about the myths of American business, Life and Death on the Corporate Battlefield (Simon and Schuster, 1983), which also appeared in Japanese, German and a pirated Taiwanese edition. Solman also helped create, and wrote the introduction to, “Morrie in His Own Words,” a book of interviews he recorded with Brandeis sociology professor Morrie Schwartz that preceded the subsequent bestseller, “Tuesdays with Morrie.” Schwartz, who died of ALS (Lou Gehrig’s Disease) in the mid-1990s, recounts his struggle with the disease, and how he learned to live so affirmatively in the face of a fatal illness.
    Solman has been a taxi driver, management consultant, kindergarten teacher and graduate student. He writes infrequently, lectures occasionally,  and has been working to help journalists and television producers in other countries (to date, Russia and Poland) explain economics using video. His most recent project is the development of a new electronic curriculum to supplement McGraw-Hill’s introductory economics textbooks. (His videos for the NewsHour have been used as teaching tools in classrooms around the world for more than a decade.)
   
last update April 1, 2004
Webpage created and maintained by Chuck Stull
Department of Economics and Business
Kalamazoo College