Charles Holt Teaching:  

The UVA Economics Department has a culture of excellent teaching at all levels; and each person has their own style, although most of us are motivated by the inspirational examples set by Ken Elzinga and Lee Coppock.  My own teaching is closely associated with my research in experimental economics.  My classes are participatory, based on classroom simulations with subsequent lab reports (Econ 2820) or student presentations based on experiments that they design and run with the students in the class (Econ 4820).  Class experiments can sometimes morph into research experiments, and I am very proud of the many academic papers that I coauthor with UVA students and lab research assistants.  One of these papers, coauthored with an engineering student (Ricky Sahu) and a former doctoral student (Angela Smith), was recently awarded the Southern Economic Journal Georgescu-Roegen best paper (runner up) award. 

I also promote my style of teaching more broadly in the profession.  Since 1996, I have published one classroom teaching experiment paper per year (27 total in a special section of my CV).  This year’s paper is “Cost Curve Confusion,” coauthored with Erica Sprott, 2021 Econ DMP,  was published in the Journal of Economic Education. along with 2 other papers by UVA colleagues (Lee Coppock and Robert Brunner).  These papers were presented in a special session on “Teaching the Crisis” that Lee Coppock and I organized at the 2023 ASSA Meeting in New Orleans, where I also received the inaugural American Economic Association Distinguished Economic Education Award. 

I write all of the textbooks that I use, and I do all of the programming for the free web-based Veconlab software that is used at UVA and in many classes around the world (about 15,000 student logins each month).  I have just finished working on a new book manuscript, The Economic Experience, (coauthored with Erica Sprott), which is forthcoming in July 2025 with Princeton University Press.  I love our non-definition of a price bubble at the end of the “What Economists Don’t Do” subsection of the chapter on price bubbles:  

To conclude, there is no need to define a price bubble, since bubbles are like tidal waves, you’ll recognize one when you see it, but you probably won’t see it coming!