Teaching an economics capstone course with a policy focus

Abstract

This article’s authors offer an organizational framework for an economics capstone course focused on analyzing current public economic policy issues. In this course, thesis topics often include public issues such as city planning, health care, transportation, education, law, the environment, and monetary and fiscal policies. The authors provide practical guidance on the development and organization of such a policy course, discuss course assignments and assessment tools, and offer advice on how to deal with potential challenges. They argue that a properly designed policy-oriented capstone course is well-suited for facilitating students’ achievement of most of the highest Hansen’s proficiencies in economics. It also may help students to gain a head start in a career in the related fields of public policy and public administration.

Keywords:

• Capstone course
• economics majors
• Hansen’s proficiencies
• public economic policy
• undergraduate research

JEL code:

• A22

Acknowledgments

The authors express their gratitude to the two anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful comments and suggestions.

Notes

1 See Croushore (2015), for example, for a discussion of a capstone in monetary policy.

2 See a discussion of the traditional econometrics-focused undergraduate instruction versus a more modern applied version of capstone experience in Angrist and Pischke (2017).

3 Behavioral economics introduces students to a new way of approaching policy options, using a more experimental approach to economics as a science. A useful book to gain insight into this approach is Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth and Happiness (2009). Instructors also may find these articles useful: Chetty (2015) and Bhargava and Loewenstein (2015).