Teaching Macroeconomics After the Crisis: A Survey Among Undergraduate Instructors in Europe and the United States

Abstract

The Great Recession raised questions of what and how macroeconomists teach at academic institutions around the globe, and what changes in the macroeconomics curriculum should be made. The authors conducted a survey of undergraduate macroeconomics instructors affiliated with colleges and universities in Europe and the United States at the end of 2010. The results show that courses feature very much the same lineups of models as they did before the crisis. A notable exception concerns public debt dynamics, which receives considerably more emphasis. The finer fabric of undergraduate macroeconomics teaching, however, shows substantial shifts: A host of topics related to financial markets has entered the curriculum, and there is more interest in economic history, the history of economic thought, and case studies.

Keywords:

• curriculum
• financial crisis
• macroeconomics
• teaching
• undergraduate

JEL codes:

• A22
• E00

Notes

Dr. Manfred Gärtner (e-mail:) is a professor of macroeconomics, Dr. des. Björn Griesbach (e-mail:) is a research assistant, and Dr. Florian Jung (e-mail:) is a research associate, all at the . Gärtner is the corresponding author.

1. A static version of the questionnaire may be consulted at http://www.fgn.unisg.ch/public/question naire.pdf. For a distribution of respondents by region and age, see Gärtner, Griesbach, and Jung (2011, Figures A.1 and A.2).

2. The instructors in our survey reported teaching some 50,000 students in their mandatory macro- economics courses. This may have to be discounted because of some double-counting, but it also underestimates overall numbers significantly because, for various reasons, countries or universities were not included, courses or instructors could not be identified, or instructors failed to respond.

3. A breakdown of the numbers into different categories and subcategories and descriptive statistics are provided in Gärtner, Griesbach, and Jung (2013, Table 1 and Table 2, respectively).

4. Splitting the aggregate picture conveyed in this section into results for first-, second- and third-year courses does not change the picture in most cases. However, there are some noteworthy cross-Atlantic differences: (1) the Keynesian cross: While it appears to be spread evenly over the three undergraduate years in the United States, there is a significant decline in Europe; (2) the IS-LM model: It also receives less and less attention in Europe after the freshman year, whereas its use strongly increases in the United States; and (3) the AD-AS model: Again, this is distributed evenly in the United States, while in Europe there is a significant peak in the second year. As a general pattern that European and U.S. undergraduate curricula share, advanced topics such as real business cycles, the New Keynesian Phillips curve, endogenous growth, and overlapping generations models are much more often taught in second- and third-year courses than in the first year.

5. In a majority of cases, less than a handful of instructors say they dropped the model. Exceptions are real business cycles (dropped by eight instructors, or 5 percent of those who do not teach it), endogenous macroeconomic policy (seven, 5 percent), endogenous growth (seven, 4 percent), neoclassical growth (six, 7 percent) and OLG models (five, 2 percent).

6. Our list bears a close relationship with the topics discussed in Blinder (2010), not least because we augmented our initial list with some of his suggestions.

7. Textbooks that did not feature liquidity traps at all before the crisis include successful intermediate texts such as Barro (1997), Burda and Wyplosz (2001), Farmer (1999), and Jones (2008). Others do mention the concept but waste only a few sentences to discard it as irrelevant (Williamson 2005) or discuss it in a box as an addition to the core material (Mankiw 2006).

8. Cross-tabbing with respect to first-, second-, and third-year courses does not suggest any significant deviations from the results presented here. Apparently, instructors embed financial topics irrespective of how far advanced classes are. Because the number of observations is rather small in some cases, this result is more fragile than the aggregate patterns reported in this section.

9. This may be a bit surprising because risk premiums feature in Blinder's (2010, 387) list of “New topics for macro principles.” After asking rhetorically, “How can we continue to teach the one-interest-rate model?” (386), Blinder even claimed that whether or not to include multiple interest rates is one of the “four basic pedagogical decisions” that must be taken (386).

10. This may not be such a surprise. A check at www.google.com/trends reveals that “quantitative easing” did not even exist as a search term prior to the fourth quarter of 2008.

11. A substantial percentage of undergraduate instructors often decided not to teach certain concepts listed in table 2. The reasons that instructors give for not covering specific topics are summarized in Gärtner, Griesbach, and Jung (2011, Table A.1).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Manfred Gärtner

Dr. Manfred Gärtner (e-mail:) is a professor of macroeconomics, Dr. des. Björn Griesbach (e-mail:) is a research assistant, and Dr. Florian Jung (e-mail:) is a research associate, all at the . Gärtner is the corresponding author.