News from the Economics Network

From Steve Cook of Swansea University, our latest case study "provides a discussion of time series decomposition along a data set and solutions illustrating its application using real world data, drawn from a classic article in applied econometrics." It comes with a downloadable spreadsheet containing the data, solutions and notes.

Two attendees at our Graduate Teaching Assistants' workshop have given us case studies. In "Teaching economics to social scientists: is current practice fit for purpose?" Eric Golson talks about firing up students' interest with real-world examples. In "Case Study from a GTA Workshop" Suparna Ray writes about the different skills a GTA has to develop, and how an Economics Network workshop helped.

The Festival of Economics is happening in Bristol over the next two days (Friday and Saturday). Organised by the Festival of Ideas and programmed by Diane Coyle, this includes four discussion events looking at the recent failures and future prospects for the subject. The Economics Network will have a stand, so please come and say hello. Follow @FestivalofIdeas on Twitter for updates.

Newly published on the Economics Network site is a case study from Gherardo Girardi of London Metropolitan University about prompting students to reflect on their own motivations for taking their course. This arose from a project funded by the Economics Network.

We are delighted to announce the individuals and organisations who have become patrons or partners of the Economics Network. See our site for the full list.

The DeSTRESS project is delivering five free workshops in open resources for statistics in social science in various locations during June. These are a chance to get experience and in-person help with a slew of new online resources created for statistics, and to learn about why and how the community can benefit from sharing materials online.

The Economics Network's latest case study, from Martin Greenhow of Brunel University, describes how he developed and used a computer-based assessment system to substantially improve student performance on a quants module while saving a lot of marking time. That system is now available freely online in the form of Maths EG; links are included in the case study.

The Economics Network is currently running a student competition. We are asking students to answer the following question: "How would you use economics to solve one of these issues: poverty; climate change; or structural unemployment?" Students can submit their entry in different formats (such as essay, poem, song) the more creative the better (last year's winning entry was in the form of a rap).
 
The prize for this years winner is £400; there are also prizes for runner-ups. The deadline for entries is the 31st of May so we would greatly appreciate if you could inform your students about this competition as soon as you can.