Economic Education Conference
13-16 July 2006
Economics is a discipline with many important and challenging ideas. How we communicate its concepts and insights at the tertiary level is an issue of increasing debate around the world. The focus of this conference was on the teaching of economics at the tertiary level around the world, including the United States/Canada/Mexico, Europe/Russia, African and Asian countries and Australia/ New Zealand.
Leading economists from several nations provided keynote addresses on contemporary issues in teaching economics , while numerous scholars from around Australia and overseas discussed their latest research findings.
Ideas presented were distributed in three ways - presentations at the conference, selected publications in The Journal of Economic Education (both hard copy and web), and a proceedings volume.
Keynote Speakers
Ted Bergstrom -
University of California, Santa Barbara
Ted Bergstrom currently holds the Aaron and Cherie Raznick Chair of
Economics at the University of California Santa Barbara. He earned his
undergraduate degree in mathematics at Carleton College in 1962 and a PhD in
economics from Stanford, where he wrote a PhD thesis on "Human Capital and
Economic Growth" for Kenneth Arrow. He has worked at Washington University
in St. Louis, the University of Michigan and from 1998, UCSB. He claims no
area of specialization within economics, having done work in general
equilibrium theory, theoretical and applied public finance, welfare
economics, international trade theory, natural resource economics, game
theory, industrial organisation, theoretical labour economics, family
economics, experimental economics, evolutionary biology, and economic
anthropology.
Edward Chen -
Lingnan University, Hong Kong
Professor Edward Chen, educated at Hong Kong University (B.A., M.Soc.Sc.)
and Oxford University (D.Phil.), is currently President of Lingnan
University in Hong Kong. He is at present also an Honorary Professor and
Distinguished Fellow of the Centre of Asian Studies at the University of
Hong Kong, Honorary Professor of Shantou University, and Visiting Professor
of Jinan University. He is at present a Director of the First Pacific
Company, a Director of Asia Satellite Telecommunications Holdings Ltd, a
Director of Wharf Holdings Ltd., and a trustee of Eaton Vance Management
Funds. Among his many public services, he is currently Chairman of the Hong
Kong Committee for Pacific Economic Cooperation. Professor Chen's research
interests focus on economic development problems in general and with special
reference to the Asian newly industrialised economies. In total, Professor
Chen has published two major books and over 100 articles in books and
international academic journals on a wide range of subjects on development
economies.
David
Colander - Middlebury College, Vermont
David Colander received his Ph.D. from Columbia University and has been the
Christian A Johnson Distinguished Professor of Economics at Middlebury
College, Middlebury, Vermont since 1982. In 2001-2002 he was the Kelly
Professor of Distinguished Teaching at Princeton University. He has
authored, co-authored, or edited over 35 books and 100 articles on a wide
range of topics. His books have been, or are being, translated into a number
of different languages, including Chinese, Bulgarian, Polish, Italian, and
Spanish. He has been President of both the Eastern Economic Association and
History of Economic Thought Society and is, or has been, on the editorial
boards of numerous journals, including Journal of Economic Perspectives and
the Journal of Economic Education.
William Greene- Stern
School of Business, New York University
Professor of Economics and Entertainment and Media Faculty Fellow, Stern
School of Business, New York University. He has a Ph.D. and MA from the
University of Wisconsin, Madison. His current teaching includes
econometrics, microeconomics and the economics of the entertainment
industry, while his research interests centre on econometric methods and
applications, particularly non-linear optimization, panel data, discrete
choice modelling and limited dependent variables, efficiency and
productivity measurement, and the economics of the entertainment and sports
businesses. Bill Greene has also taught at Oxford, Cornell, University of
Lund, Penn State and the University of Sydney and completed numerous
consultancies. His research has appeared in Econometrica; Journal of
Political Economy; Journal of Econometrics; Journal of Economic
Perspectives; Journal of Economic Education; Applied Economics; Review of
Economics and Statistics; and the American Economic Review. William Greene
is also the author of the textbook Econometric Analysis and the developer of
the econometric software packages LIMDEP and NLOGIT.
John Hey -
Universities of York and Bari
John D. Hey is presently Professor of Economics and Statistics (part time),
University of York (UK) and Professore Ordinario, Universit di Bari
(Italy). From 1986 to 1996 he was Managing Editor of the Economic Journal.
Currently on Editorial Boards of Experimental Economics, Journal of Risk and
Uncertainty, Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, the Geneva Papers on
Risk and Decision Theory, Empirica and others. He has published 19 books and
numerous articles, amongst which papers are in the American Economic Review;
Economic Journal; Quarterly Journal of Economics; Journal of Political
Economy and the Journal of Public Economics. He is the co-founder of EXEC,
the Centre for Experimental Economics, at the University of York and ESSE,
Economia Sperimentale al Sud d'Europa, at the University of Bari. He is
Vice-President of the Economic Science Association. His current research
interests include decisions (both static and dynamic) under conditions of
risk and uncertainty using, inter alia, experimental methods.
Kim Sosin -
University of Nebraska, Omaha
Kim Sosin is the Noddle Distinguished Professor of Economics and Chair of
the Department of Economics at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. Sosin's
scholarly publications are in the areas of economic education,
macroeconomics, labour and gender economics, economic growth and technology.
Her papers have appeared in economics journals such as the Journal of
Economic Education; Journal of Money, Credit and Banking; American Journal
of Agricultural Economics; Feminist Economics and Review of Economics and
Statistics. Sosin is the Associate Editor of the Online section of the
Journal of Economic Education. She is creator and webmaster for EcEdWeb
(http://ecedweb.unomaha.edu), which was the first major web site dedicated
to providing online resources for economic education at all levels.
Public Seminar Speaker
Avinash Dixit -
Princeton University
Avinash Dixit is Sherrerd University Professor of Economics at Princeton
University. He was educated at Bombay and Cambridge Universities and MIT,
and has taught at Berkeley, Oxford, Warwick and Princeton. He was President
of the Econometric Society in 2001, and a Vice-President of the American
Economic Association in 2002. His research interests include international
trade, industrial organisation, public economics, political economy, and the
new institutional economics. His books include Theory of International Trade
(with Victor Norman); Investment Under Uncertainty (with Robert Pindyck);
Thinking Strategically (with Barry Nalebuff) and Games of Strategy (with
Susan Skeath). He has also written numerous articles in professional
journals.
Conference Dinner Speaker
Louise Sylvan - Deputy Chair of the Australian Competition and
Consumer Commission
Louise Sylvan was formerly the Chief Executive of the Australian Consumers'
Association (ACA) and President of Consumers International. Louise is well
known for her work in enhancing consumer rights in a range of areas such as
health, food safety issues, financial services, as well as in competition
and consumer policy. She was included as one of Australias 20 True Leaders
in 2002 by the Australian Financial Reviews BOSS magazine. Currently,
Louise serves internationally on the OECD Consumer Policy Committee and
nationally on the federal governments Expert Group in Electronic Commerce
and the Australian Statistics Advisory Council to the ABS. Prior memberships
have included six years on the Australian Prime Minister's Economic Planning
Advisory Council and the Self-Regulation Task Force in 1999-2000.
Other Participants
William Becker
Professor of Economics, Indiana University, Editor Journal of Economic
Education and editor of the Economic Research Network Educator
David Round
University of South Australia
Martin Shanahan
University of South Australia
John Siegfried
Professor of Economics at Vanderbilt University. Secretary of the American
Economics Association.
Michael Watts
Professor of Economics, Purdue University. Winner, International Economic
Education Award 2002. Associate Editor of the Journal of Economic Education
since 1988.
William Walstad
Professor of Economics, University of Nebraska, Lincoln. Author of Teaching
Undergraduate Economics. Chair of the Committee on Economic Education of the
American Economic Association