Charles Holt Teaching:  

The UVA Economics Department has a culture of excellent teaching at all levels; each person has their own style, although most of us are motivated by the inspirational examples set by Ken Elzinga, Lee Coppock, and many others.  My own teaching is closely associated with research in experimental economics.  My classes are participatory, based on classroom simulations with subsequent lab reports (Behavioral Economics Econ 3820) or based on student team presentations following experiments that they design and run with the students in the class (Experimental Economics Econ 4820). Both classes are always oversubscribed.  In 2023, I received the inaugural American Economic Association Distinguished Economic Education Award.  It was rewarding to read some of the nomination letters written by students and faculty colleagues.  

Since 1996, I have published one classroom teaching experiment paper per year (29 total in a special section of my CV). Class experiments can sometimes morph into research experiments, and I am very proud of the many refereed papers that I coauthor with UVA students and lab research assistants.  One of these, “Missing the Margin: Behavioral Biases in Iterated Decisions,” forthcoming in the Review of Behavioral Economics, is coauthored with former economics students Erica Sprott, Madeliene Green and Juliette Sellgren.   A second paper “An Analysis of “The Jamestown Survival Game: A Classroom Experiment” was coauthored with a former lab RA and Economics Teaching Fellow, Madison Smither (now at Harvard JFK MPP), along with Lee Coppock and Cate Johnson (WVU).  A third paper: “Teaching the Crisis: A Leverage Experiment,” was written with Lee Coppock and Daniel Harper (former Head TA for Econ 2010-2020).  All three papers are forthcoming in the Southern Economic Journal.

I write the textbooks that I use, and I do the programming for the free web-based Veconlab software that is used in many classes around the world: https:/veconlab.com/   The book I use for Behavioral Economics was published this year by Princeton University Press: The Economic Experience: An Introduction with Experiments, coauthored with Erica Sprott, a former UVA econ major, Distinguished Teaching Fellow and DMP, now a doctoral student at the Harvard Kennedy School.   I love our non-definition of a price bubble in the “What Economists Don’t Do” subsection of the Asset Markets chapter:

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!