Conference and seminar sessions in Curriculum and content
→ More specific
Teaching Economics in Professional Contexts
Panel at EconTEAching sessions,Programming resources that provide real-life challenges
Workshop at DEE 2025,The PSI pedagogy in a level 5 microeconomics course
Presentation at DEE 2025,Teaching the history of economics
Panel at DEE 2025,Macroeconomic model simulation made easy: Introducing the "DIY macroeconomic model simulation" website
Presentation at INERME Conference 2025,Critical Reflection by First Years
Presentation at Northern Economics Network seminars,A Cooperative Virtual Exchange within the Economics Curriculum: A pilot study on developing global competency
Presentation at Exeter Pedagogy, Economics, Research, and Teaching seminars (ExPERTS),Using Squid Game to Teach Game Theory
Presentation at Exeter Pedagogy, Economics, Research, and Teaching seminars (ExPERTS),Panel: Innovations in teaching CORE Econ
Panel at DEE 2023,- Extended abstract
- PowerPoint slides for Econframe presentation by Lavinia Moldovan and Ramin Nassehi
Improving Student Comprehension Through Interactive Model Visualization
Workshop at DEE 2023,Incorporating values and value judgements into economics teaching
Workshop at DEE 2023,Examining the outcomes of switching Economics 1 to the Core syllabus in the same year of the COVID-19 pandemic’s disruptions
Presentation at DEE 2023,Teaching using ‘Measuring the Economy’
Workshop at DEE 2021,Storytelling with simulations: Interactive ideas for teaching economic models
Workshop at DEE 2021,On the effectiveness of behavioural-based course materials to improve financial literacy and reduce the myopic bias in insurance and investment decisions
Presentation at DEE 2021,What’s wrong with how we teach (and then practice) econometrics? What can we do about it?
Presentation at DEE 2021,Embedding coding and project management skills into the economics curriculum - reflections from a Python for Economics course
Presentation at DEE 2021,Interactive Learning with R-Markdown and R-Shiny Apps: Statistics for Economics and Business
Workshop at DEE 2021,Pluralism in teaching economics to post-graduate students: emancipation vs. “business as usual”
Presentation at DEE 2021,Breaking down the language barrier: using pop culture from across the globe to teach microeconomics
Presentation at DEE 2021,Economic history and the future of pedagogy in economics
Presentation at DEE 2019,There is a paradox in university-level economics teaching. Economics graduates achieve extremely good labour market outcomes as measured by earnings premia. But students are increasingly voicing concerns about the contents of their degrees being irrelevant and “out of touch” in the modern world. While the mixture of transferable skills and quantitative methods taught in economics programmes helps to explain the former, the dominance of decontextualised mathematical economics in most introductory-level teaching is no doubt the cause of the latter. We examine the scope that introducing economic history into undergraduate teaching has for “rehabilitating” university economics teaching. We think that lessons from economic history provide invaluable insights into the big global challenges of today’s world—whether it is trade wars, financial crises, migration pressures, climate change or extreme political uncertainty. We set out how economic history can complement other empirical branches of economics to help reform the dominant paradigm in economics pedagogy. We then explore the benefits and costs of introducing economic history across the undergraduate curriculum, both as stand-alone modules and integrated into other field courses. We conclude with a discussion of the particular challenges faced in the context of economics pedagogy in the business school.
Curriculum structure, content and reform
Presentation at DEE 2019,Students who enter business schools and economics departments are rarely exposed to the study of the humanities as moral philosophy, theoretical philosophy, history of economic thought, literature. Recently, calls have been made to reshape economics along a human-centred approach, “Humanomics”. In this article, we explore this approach as put forward recently by Vernon Smith, McCloskey, Morson and Shapiro, and concentrate on the contribution that it can provide to reshaping economics education. We concentrate, in particular, on Philosophy of economics, after a decade of experience in teaching this course. We indicate why it adds to the formation of the economic student and should be an integral part of the economics curriculum. Also, we focus on the method of teaching, involving formative and summative assessments, to student who generally have never been exposed to the subject. We conclude that a philosophical approach to education should inform both the teaching method and the content of the curriculum. Regarding the former, we claim that a problem-solution-error elimination approach, recently named in the educational literature as “Popper’s approach to education”, would be beneficial in developing a critical thinking attitude. Concerning the latter, we claim that philosophy of economics can help students address questions in the discipline, become aware of assumptions (hidden or not), challenge the answers that they learn in traditional economics textbooks, in areas such as the definition of economics, the role of models, the data/theory relationship, the normative/positive divide, the notion of rationality and others, which are an essential part of their curriculum.
Teaching the principles of nuanced Economics
Keynote at DEE 2019,- Presentation slides
- Some texts quoted:
- McGraw-Hill Connect Master press release
- Mill's discussion of Communism from "Principles of Political Economy"
- Marshall’s Discussion of Marginal productivity
- Robert Solow on pre-Samuelson textbooks
- Adam Smith's discussion of the impartial spectator
- John Stuart Mill's explanation of the Devil's Advocate
- Mill on income inequality
Altruism and market efficiency: a proposal to change the syllabus
Presentation at DEE 2019,The economics textbook suggests that, when market inefficiencies arise, there is an argument for state intervention. Whilst this is an entirely reasonable proposition, it overlooks the deeper fact that market failure is essentially due self-interest: if a monopoly were altruistic, it would not raise its price to be far above marginal cost; if economic agents took into consideration the effect of the pollution they cause on third parties, they would pollute less; and so on. We make the case for introducing a discussion of altruism in the economics syllabus at the point where market inefficiencies are explained. This is fairly straight-forward and it brings to the fore the detrimental effect that self-interest can have on other agents' well-being. Furthermore, this argument points to the desirability to educate economic agents so that they are altruistic, consistently with society's expectations of the role of educators.
Is altruism irrational? Fighting the stereotypic view on human behaviour during economics classes
Presentation at DEE 2019,The purpose of this article is to present the way of using the replication of the experiment Giving According to GARP (Andreoni & Miller, J. 2002) to teach the basics economic concepts and connect them with ethic issues. It is used to present problems related to the definition of the economic model (Homo oeconomicus). Although the scientific literature shows the evolution of homo oeconomicus towards the alternative form of ecological rationality, textbooks still tend to concentrate mainly on the simplified model. The method of using this experiment differs from typical classroom-exemplars. The new method is based on the confrontation of i) storytelling, which is included with textbooks ii) the statistical analysis of students' rationality and attitude towards altruism.
Doing economics: teaching data with CORE
Presentation at DEE 2019,This session provides an overview of Doing Economics, CORE's online resource for teaching data literacy skills, with particular emphasis on how to teach statistics and data handling to non-economists. The session will introduce the resource and discuss various ways in which it can and is being used to support active empirical work in classes.
Eradicating data phobia in students
Presentation at DEE 2019,Many aspects of everyday life, including economic, financial, social and environmental dimensions can be described by data, particularly quantitative data. Unsurprisingly therefore, the skills and knowledge associated with data analysis are an important part of the toolkit for any economics graduate. Indeed, repeated surveys of employers of economists show that they particularly value students who are comfortable analysing economic data, for example, using popular spreadsheet packages. Unfortunately, economics curricula across UK Higher Education tend frequently to ‘ghettoise’ the teaching of quantitative analysis so that students perceive data analysis as separate from general economic analysis. Quantitative analysis tends to default to econometrics, and overly complex and abstract presentation fuels many students’ phobia of data with many eschewing the analysis of quantitative data altogether. Furthermore, curricula often fail to develop students’ skills in the use of spreadsheet software that are valued by employers. This paper proposes ways in which students’ data competency can be enhanced across the curriculum. Core economics teaching can incorporate the sourcing and analysis of economic data in their teaching, learning and assessment. This will help prevent students from viewing such analysis as distinct from ‘other’ economic analysis or, worse still, either largely irrelevant to the subject or something to be avoided. It can be embedded from introductory level, making students comfortable accessing data from credible sources and using contemporary spreadsheet software. Further, the analysis need not default to econometrics after introductory level. Effective integration should mean using all the analytical tools in the economist’s toolkit, including charting and descriptive statistics. Adopting this approach will produce economics graduates who are more comfortable in working with data and who, as a result, can make sense of economics data more easily and have developed a series of associated transferrable skills valued by employers.
Measuring the economy
Presentation at DEE 2019,The Office for National Statistics is creating an online book ‘Measuring the Economy’ for use by universities to support undergraduate and postgraduate economic statistics teaching. The book aims to convey the importance of best-practice, real-world economic measurement, and as such to support academics and students in understanding the issues surrounding the measurement of the modern economy. Chapters are being written by leading experts in their subject area, with the aim being to bring their knowledge and expertise together in a single output. Our aim is for the chapters to be standalone, so that they can be used a la carte while, also maintaining a common and coherent approach. We are looking to develop teaching resources for each chapter- case studies, exercises and test questions for example, once the chapter has been published in Beta. We wish to collaborate with teaching staff and members of the Economics Network to shape the project and ensure the final product is beneficial to the University community.
An online simulation about horizontal differentiation
Workshop at DEE 2017,This workshop will demonstrate a new online simulation about horizontal differentiation. Four teams participate to a 3D location and pricing Hotelling game (with quadratic transportation costs). In the complete game, they first simultaneously choose their location on a map before competing in price. In the last part of the game, players also decide whether or not to participate in the funding of a subway station, that would increase demand at the center of the map (hence increasing incentives to locate near the center). This pedagogic sequence is structured in a very progressive way. Players first play a tutorial to get into the game, in which they only have to make price decisions for a number of imposed locations (level design). Players are invited to change their decisions in order to highlight how they impact the outcomes (trial and error cycles). Our favored approach is to run the simulation before any lecture about differentiation. After the game has been played, debriefing allows to introduce tools and notions that would have helped students make their decisions, and are then more concrete. This is also a good opportunity to broaden the discussion to the use of models and to emulate IO research process (building a simple model --> confrontation with reality - discussion about the validity of the model --> building a more elaborate model --> etc). The game will be in free access on economics-games.com (it is still in beta test).
Escaping the economist’s straightjacket: overcoming the free-rider mentality which prevents climate change from being effectively addressed
Presentation at DEE 2017,Economists’ ability to propose radical solutions to the problem of climate change is severely limited by one of the assumption they normally make about human nature, namely that it is fundamentally selfish and that this defining characteristic cannot be changed. An important consequence of this characteristic is known as free-riding, which occurs when people do not bother to take eco-friendly actions as these are costly to them, preferring to wait for others to take such actions and enjoy the resultant benefits. The problem is that, if all behave in this way, social paralysis may easily occur and climate change is likely to remain unaddressed, or to be addressed only superficially. Using a simplified version of George (2001)’s model of first and second order preferences, this paper considers ways of motivating people at a deeper (second order) level to take actions (at the first order level) that are eco-friendly. These include reducing market pressure/advertising, promoting contact with nature and relying more on spirituality and mindfulness.
Introducing economics to millennials using short YouTube movie clips
Presentation at DEE 2017,The objective of this paper is to show a way to improve the understanding of foundational economic concepts to millennials. Students’ answers to an anonymous survey show that the objectives of this method have been reached: students achieve a better understanding of the concepts; they realize that microeconomic models can be useful in their daily lives; they undoubtedly consider that thanks to the YouTube clips, Economics models can be applied to other situations apart from the problem sets; they improve their learning and retain concepts better; and they even think of analyzing some personal experiences through the prism of Economics. Therefore, this is an effective method. The low cost of this proposal also makes it efficient. This paper also provides links to YouTube clips and examples that instructors can use in their own presentations and problem sets.
Teaching Real Analysis to economics students
Presentation at DEE 2017,Teaching a proof based course such as Real Analysis to economics students can be achieved even in a short intensive course. I will discuss how I train students, aspiring to pursue postgraduate studies, to reflect on mathematical ideas, critically study proofs and eventually write short proofs themselves. Teaching and learning are based on the Round Table model. The teaching components of the course are delivered in a variety of ways such as lectures, and short pre-recorded videos. Concepts and results are presented in a rigorous yet intuitive way and learning is based on activities and peer-instruction. The model is implemented on a termly second year undergraduate course for dual mathematics and economics degree, as well as on short summer intensive course for economics students which is delivered partly online and partly in campus.
Exploring Economics - Our experiences of influencing economics education in government
Presentation at DEE 2017,Exploring Economics is a cross departmental government network that aims to improve policymakers' understanding of economics, and to increase the diversity of economic thinking, in government. Over the last year, we have built this network from scratch. We now have over 200 participants, and support from some of the most senior government economists. The thinking behind our network largely grew out of student movements such as ‘Rethinking Economics’, which aim to make economics education more pluralistic, and to make economics more democratic. After leaving university, we wanted to continue this in government. As part of this, we have been developing new modules for government economists, working with the Government Economics service, so that they can learn about a plurality of economics ideas, and hopefully apply them (where appropriate) to policy. Our proposed session would share some of our findings from our experiences. We would talk about the differences between learning/teaching in a university environment to that in the world of government and policy. We would discuss where we think economics could change for the better, and how this change could be achieved. We think that doing this could help students see the connections between their learning and government economics.
Teaching business economics for sustainability - the roles of a business person privileged in classroom practice
Presentation at DEE 2017,New teaching approaches to include ‘sustainable development’ in the business curriculum are currently being developed with the expectation that students will become better equipped to address sustainability issues as budding business people. At the same time education for sustainable development has been argued as being particularly challenging in the context of business education due to assumptions underpinning orthodox business theories. This article presents a study of the roles of a business person privileged by teachers in the classroom when the concept of ‘sustainable development’ is incorporated in the subject of business economics. The empirical material, consisting of video recorded observations in five teachers’ classrooms, was collected two years after the inclusion of the concept in the upper secondary school syllabus in Sweden. The results show how different rules and conditions for doing business are foregrounded in classroom practice, which have different implications for whether a responsible business person is expected to: a) adapt to self-interest (in narrow terms), b) respond to consumers’ increasing interest for sustainable products, or c) be sensitive to stakeholders’ diverging interests. Detailed empirical examples illuminating how different classroom practices open up for different (egoistic vs altruistic) roles are provided with the aim that they should be useful for teachers (and anyone involved in design of lessons and/or educational materials) to develop a professional vision to identify when and how in educational practice ‘homo economicus’ becomes a norm as well as when and how other norms might emerge.
D.C. Hague's 'The economist in a business school': a quinquagenarial reflection
Presentation at DEE 2017,In a classic Journal of Management Studies paper published in 1965, the eminent economist Professor (latterly Sir) Douglas Chalmers Hague (1926-2014) explored the role of the economist in a business school, offering thoughts on the aims, curricula and teaching of economics, and specifically the theory of the firm, in the context of business education. Much has changed in the intervening period. Business schools, then rare in the UK (Hague himself helped establish Manchester Business School in 1965), are now ubiquitous, with a significant proportion of economists located in ‘embedded’ economics departments. But the nature of economics itself has changed too. Hague wrote about entrepreneurship and practiced it throughout his career, and his textbook with Stonier (with its Marshallian flavour) was influential as a counterweight to the emerging General Equilibrium drift/formalist turn within economics. In the 1960s management authors like Drucker were also reacting against this turn, suggesting equilibrium itself was to blame; Hague represents an attempt to strike a middle way in which Drucker’s emphasis on management/scepticism with equilibrium is reconciled with a less formal, more Marshallian economics. Fifty years on it seems appropriate to reflect on Hague’s observations from the very early days of UK business schools, and to consider the contemporary teaching of economics to business and management students. The criticism of economics post 2007-8 for example, may be interpreted not as a need for heterodox economics, but instead a return to a more modest Marshallian conception in teaching.
How to teach ethics and economics
Presentation at DEE 2017,The paper describes the development of a course on Ethics & Economics. This module aims to provide students with the knowledge and skills to contrast and integrate ethics and economics and enable students to apply moral philosophy and economic theory to an appropriate, but freely chosen economic policy or management decision problem. The module aims to provide students with skills in evaluating economic policies and company practices based on a variety of alternative concepts. The paper will present my methods to teach this course, my motivation and how I get them to develop and communicate a moral point of view and to apply it to an economic policy or company practice. The paper will also reflect on my experience with flipping the classroom.
Power, Economics, and a Return to Political Economy: A Polemic
Presentation at DEE 2017,The paper will summarise my book: “Power and Neoclassical Economics: A Return to Political Economy in the Teaching of Economics”, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, in which I argue that, without an understanding of power, economists cannot fully answer the core problem they define their discipline by, since marginal productivity theory can only provide a partial explanation, at best, of the distribution of income and wealth in society. I argue that this at least partly accounts for the dissatisfaction with current economics teaching expressed by the Post-Crash Economics Society and related student movements and why Thomas Piketty’s “Capital in the 21st Century” has so caught the public imagination. The reasons why neoclassical economics neglects power, and attempts by political scientists, philosophers, sociologists and heterodox economists to conceptualise power, are reviewed. It is argued that these latter attempts have failed to achieve a universally accepted theory of power that can be readily applied to economics, but that neoclassical economics offers within its own “tool kit” the means for developing a theory of power: all that is required is a slightly different way of looking at some familiar concepts. An alternative definition of power is proposed which, it is argued, is more suited to economics than standard, behaviouralist definitions, and an approach is outlined for generalising the notion of bargaining power in cooperative game theory to identify a “political economy function” that may be used to analyse power within a general equilibrium framework.
Business Economics as Real World Economics: A Proposal for an Educational Reform
Presentation at DEE 2015,“What Do We Want? Pluralism. When Will We Get It? Yesterday”: A Critical Review of Applied Economics Provision in the UK
Presentation at DEE 2015,Three-Headed Economists, CORE and the QAA
Presentation at DEE 2015,Fighting the Ebola virus: an example of qualitative risk modelling in a resource-constrained environment
Presentation at DEE 2015,Monte Carlo simulation and visualisation as advanced research and teaching tools for microeconomics
Presentation at DEE 2015,Teaching and Learning Economics Using Modern Art
Presentation at DEE 2015,Teaching monetary policy with contrasting methods
Presentation at DEE 2015,The World if… economics was not so dismal
Keynote at DEE 2015,TRIBE: online teaching resource for business and economics
Presentation at DEE 2015,Remaining challenges
Panel at Revisiting the State of Economics Education,Engaging students with real-world data
Panel at Revisiting the State of Economics Education,Broadening the Curriculum
Panel at Revisiting the State of Economics Education,Implementing a new CORE
Panel at Revisiting the State of Economics Education,The future of macroeconomics in higher education
Panel at DEE 2013,Networks and economics theory
Keynote at DEE 2013,The map is not the territory: How to make economics relevant
Keynote at DEE 2013,DEE 2011 keynote
Keynote at DEE 2011,Fiscal Policy and the Crisis
Keynote at DEE 2009,DEE 2009 Keynote
Keynote at DEE 2009,How can economists grab the attention of students, and keep it?
Keynote at DEE 2007,Teaching Relevant Economics
Keynote at DEBE 2005,Chatterji challenges lecturers to start from a blank page rather than tradition when creating a course. His case-study based method connects the course both to the current research literature and the students' own experiences as consumers and labourers.
Using Competition Law Cases to Teach Economics
Keynote at DEBE 2005,Sir John spoke on "Using Competition Law Cases to Teach Economics". Soon to return to academia, he will be using competition cases, enriched by his own experience at the OFT, to teach microeconomic theory and policy.
