Below are links to my teaching philosophy, teaching reviews, and a list of courses with sample syllabi. Further down the page are brief descriptions for courses that I have taught and descriptions of structure and content for courses I am interested in and qualified to teach in the future.
Economic Empirical Tools (Coming Spring 2022!)
Environmental Economics
Current Debates in Public Economics
In this class you will learn a new set of tools to use in personal, business, and political decision making. You will learn to “think like an economist,” which will not only help you make rational decisions, but also assist you in viewing and understanding the world around you.
Economics is the study of how individuals, firms, and government allocate scarce resources to the production and consumption of goods and services. Economics is also, unfortunately, commonly used and misused in public debates. Therefore, understanding basic economic principles is a critical component of being an informed citizen.
Without statistics, data would just be a bunch of numbers and words in a spreadsheet. In this course, you will develop skills in drawing conclusions and critically evaluating results based on data.
This course explores the measurement and evaluation of economic models, and puts what you’ve learned in other core economic courses to action. Learning econometrics is a hands-on endeavor, and requires the use of both economic theory and statistical analysis.
Throughout the course we will use readings from economics, sociology, psychology, and nutrition to explore determinants of poverty and food insecurity. These topics will be extended outside the classroom through experiential learning activities that motivate each topic in a real world context.
This course will introduce students to common data statistical programs they are likely to interactive with whether continuing in academia, government, or industry. Utilizing small economic research questions, the course will progress through multiple programs (Excel, Tableau, SQL, SAS, and Jupyter Notebook) to give students a survey of what programs are available, which are more appropriate for certain tasks, and how to use each to complement the others. *Note: Three common statistical programs used by economist, Stata, R, and GIS, are not covered because Colby College has stand alone classes covering these programs.
This course will begin by motivating environmental economics as another way of communicating the environment's value to meet the student's passion for the environment. After a brief review of economic principles and how these principles relate to topics such as market failure, externalities, and public goods, the course will move through traditional introductory environmental economic topics, using Tietenberg and Lewis. Topics covered will include, but are not limited to types of environmental valuation (use, option, non-use) and how to measure them, energy markets (renewable and non-renewable resources), pollution control (stock/fund, point source, non-point source) and associated policies (cap and trade, taxes), and environmental justice topics. In-class discussion will complement textbook topics by referencing real world examples of policies and incorporating experiments/games. In addition to traditional problem set and exam assessments, the course will utilize both written and spoken debate on local (dam removal), state (packaging waste a cost to producer, banning PFAs, CMP corridor), national (renewable energy debates), and international (environmental treaties) level topics.
The course will be organized as a modular seminar course. By this I mean, I will develop 5-6 self-contained modules around current issues in Public Economics. Each module would be approximately 3-4 weeks and include readings from professional literature (i.e., the Journal of Economic Perspectives), popular press sources (i.e., New Yorker, Wall Street Journal), relevant economic models, and an empirical lab assignment. Furthermore, each module will culminate in a class debate that is informed by the models and readings introduced throughout. Potential modules include:
Imposing work requirements for SNAP benefits
Free Community College
Universal Health Care
Indicators of the Health of the Economy
Minimum Wage Laws
Tariffs as an Effective Trade Tool
Since all are not able to be covered in one term, students will have agency in forming the course by selecting modules at the beginning of the term.
The course will introduce students to the basic theories of labor markets and will emphasize the interaction between theory and empirical application. The first part of the course will be devoted to studying the labor demand decisions taken by firms in competitive markets, the supply decisions taken by rational workers, and the equilibrium outcomes in these markets. The second part of the course analyzes imperfect labor markets, with the remainder of the course covering other important topics in labor economics such as human capital, wage inequality and discrimination.
Microeconomics is a set of theories which aim to help us understand the core economic problem: the process by which scarce resources are allocated among alternative uses. Microeconomic theory follows a systematic line of development, beginning with models of the typical (or representative) consumer or firm. The models take the form of optimization problems where the decision-maker (consumer or firm) seeks the best alternative from a set of feasible alternatives. This allows us to examine and understand the way in which optimal choices vary with changes in the underlying conditions of the problem (such as prices). From these typical models, we remove assumptions one by one to address the models with increased complexity and relevance to the real world.