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ABSTRACT
Angrist and Pischke (2017) call for a pedagogical paradigm shift by pointing out that econometrics courses often do not align with modern empirical approaches employed by economists. This article's authors propose a modern capstone experience, designed to address these concerns by integrating econometrics into the traditional capstone approach. They couple a full econometrics course with a traditional capstone course by weaving a cohesive econometrics-heavy research paper through the two courses. They feel this approach addresses the lack of econometrics skills among economics majors while simultaneously making some necessary improvements to undergraduate econometrics content. They hope this article will be a valuable resource for programs changing course requirements or revamping their curriculum to better fit the increasing demand for data analysis skills in the job market.
Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank Ben Scafidi for helping design the senior year course sequence and John Perry for his carefully reasoned comments and suggestions. The authors also appreciate the helpful suggestions from session participants at the J. Whitney Bunting College of Business Research Assembly, the Association of Private Enterprise Education, and the Academy of Economics and Finance. Finally, the authors would like to thank two anonymous referees and the editor, KimMarie McGoldrick, who helped improve the content and presentation of the paper.
Notes
1. Although our sequence occurs during the senior year (which is why we refer to our capstone class as “senior seminar”), this could also be implemented during the junior year. Some may argue that a senior-year sequence is too late, especially for students applying to graduate school.
2. Students are provided with videos describing essential Stata programming skills and specific Stata commands are discussed when covering relevant topics. For example, the probit, dprobit, and oprobit commands are all discussed in class when we cover limited dependent variable models.
3. We have also covered regression discontinuity, but only when a student in the course is actually going to employ that technique.
4. For example, The Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (http://www.icpsr.umich.edu) is one of the most commonly used data repositories by our students.
5. Your approach to this component of the process may need to be different, by necessity, from what we propose. Faculty can adjust the approval process to fit their needs and circumstances. For example, it may be easier to have another econometrics professor provide outside approval.
7. Some of these papers are quite good. Two of our students have won the Frank W. Taussig Award for undergraduate research given by Omicron Delta Epsilon, The International Economics Honor Society. In the past four years, four students have also won the Best Undergraduate Paper Award at the annual conference of the Academy of Economics and Finance.
8. The American Economic Association also maintains a list of annual conferences that hold undergraduate research sessions. The list can be found at https://www.aeaweb.org/resources/students/undergrad-research