Seminar

The Economics Department invites you to the next meeting of its seminar series on Friday, March 7th from 3:30-4:30 pm in room 230 Wimberly Hall. The speaker will be Professor Kevin Quinn, St. Norbert College, who will present “Passing on Success? Productivity Outcomes for Quarterbacks Chosen in the 1999-2004 National Football League Player Entry Drafts.” A copy of the paper is available from Mike Haupert. Students welcome, particularly upper division econ majors.

Making Economics Relevant Again

Check out today's New York Times article by David Leonhardt "Making Economics Relevant Again".

The author set out to find, who among economists was "using economics to make the world a better place?"

Here's what he found:

"I received dozens of diverse responses, but there was still a runaway winner. The small group of economists who work at the Jameel Poverty Action Lab at M.I.T., led by Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee, were mentioned far more often than anyone else.

Ms. Duflo, Mr. Banerjee and their colleagues have a simple, if radical, goal. They want to overhaul development aid so that more of it is spent on programs that actually make a difference. And they are trying to do so in a way that skirts the long-running ideological debate between aid groups and their critics."

Internationalizing Intermediate Microeconomics

While surfing some economics blogs recently, I came across this entry by Endogenous Preferences.

Here's a review of an article that the blogauthor links us to on how to improve students' learning and motivation.

“This paper describes an internationally-oriented course module for intermediate microeconomics.We describe the collaboration project as well as the results of implementing it at an US and Peruvian university. In the project, US university students were partnered with comparable students at a Peruvian university to complete a project using web-based learning tools and internet conferencing.

Project learning objectives are identified and an outline of the project and assignments is presented. Based on our experiences,we evaluate the project and consider problems and issues that arose. Our results suggest that the current state of web-based technology affords university students many opportunities to productively collaborate with their international counterparts.”

Worldmaps With Themes

I recently stumbled across this interesting and, maybe, helpful website: Maplecroft Maps
It provides world maps with about 64 different themes like Aid, Business Integrity and Corruption, Child Soldiers, Child Labor, Female Rights, Financial Inclusion, Digital Inclusion, Debt, Natural Disasters' Economic Losses, Trafficking ... Each map is accompanies with detailed explanations, analysis and additional information. The site also provides movies on some countries, regions and global issues.

Debit cards for everyone!

Glenn Beck, a columnist for the New York Daily News, Headline News and CNN, presented an interesting idea for the implementation of the upcoming stimulus package. Instead of printing checks and hoping they will be used for consumption he suggests to give debit cards instead. Equipped with an expiration date in three or six months they will provide a quick stimulus since it would be cumbersome to turn them into savings. Here is the link to the article http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/02/12/beck.stimulus.package/index.html

The cost of making money

Last night 60 minutes had a piece on the growing concern that it now costs approximately 2 cents to make a penny and over 6 cents to make a nickel. The rising costs stem from the increase in the price of the commodity (zinc and copper) used in the production of the coins.

The piece also addresses the additional time costs of using pennies in transactions and the possible inflation if the US were to abolish the penny.

The clip is about 10 minutes long.

Should We Make Cents?
http://www.cbsnews.com/sections/i_video/main500251.shtml?id=3814132n
CBS News Online

Seminar

The first department seminar of the semester will take place Friday, February 8th at 3:30 pm in room 230 Wimberly. Our guest speaker will be Jarod Hart, an economics and math major here at UWL. Jarod received a UWL undergraduate research grant for this research, which he also presented at the national undergraduate research conference last fall. Please encourage your upper division students to attend and support one of our home grown scholars. We will serve pizza and soda at an informal social immediately following the seminar. I look forward to seeing all of you there.

Jarod will be presenting: Strategic Market Games with Bayesian Learning
Faculty advisor: Dr. Barb Bennie

We study a game theoretic economic model involving symmetric agents who compete by bidding to purchase goods in a series of stages. The production of the good is assumed to be from an unknown distribution. Each agent bids according to the Nash equilibrium strategy that incorporates the history of observed production. As more information is obtained, the agents learn more about the unknown distribution by way of Bayesian learning. We compare the expected inflation rate for each stage to the infation rate when the production distribution is known, which is established by the Fisher equation. When the production distribution is unknown, the expected inflation deviates from results of the Fisher equation. Although as more is learned about the unknown distribution over time, the expected infation converges to the infation rate determined by the Fisher equation.