A Research-Based Development Economics Course for Undergraduates

Abstract

The authors present details of a research-based course in development economics taught at a private liberal arts college. There were three key elements in this class: teaching of applied econometrics, group presentations reviewing published and working papers in development economics, and using concepts taught in class to write an original research paper. The project required using econometric analyses on an existing data set that was available online to answer a question in development economics. The authors illustrate how the three elements of the class complemented each other and provide a case study as an example.

Keywords:

• applied econometrics
• teaching development economics
• upper-level elective

JEL codes:

• A13
• A22
• O12

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The authors are grateful to Dan Barbezat, Adam Honig, Jun Ishii, Chris Kingston, Walter Nicholson, Jessica Reyes, Kate Sims, Frank Westhoff, Geof Woglom, and Beth Yarbrough for their advice and support during the course. Thanks also goes to the Dean of the Faculty for supporting this project and the students in the Microeconomics of Development class who were always enthusiastic, in particular, Julie Christensen, Andrew Edelman, Matthew Friedrich, Philip Hendrix, and Micah Rotich.

Notes

¹These upper-level electives have different variations: Students may be asked to read and discuss papers (Elliott 2004), or write a literature review, or they may be assigned an independent research project (Reyes 2010). Research projects may be replication exercises or focus mainly on the research process rather than the results (McGoldrick 2008a, 2008b). They also could be aimed to produce publishable works (Fenn et al. 2010).

²Different institutions might have a varying number of development economics courses depending upon enrollment, availability of development economists, and average class sizes at that institution. For example, at Wesleyan University, only one upper-level elective in development economics is offered, and this course has a wide coverage. At Williams, however, besides a rather comprehensive theory course, four separate upper-level electives on political economy, incentives, urbanization, and micro-finance are also offered. Also, most of these courses have a writing component, which are typically short analysis papers, but none require the final project to be a research paper. Sometimes, schools (e.g., Harvard) have senior thesis seminars especially designed to produce papers in development economics.

³An Introduction to STATA handout is available from the contact author upon request.

⁴The full syllabus, including the assigned reading and grading breakdown, is available from the contact author upon request.

⁵The final two-hour exam was to be based on material covered in the class including lectures and class discussions on the papers in the course syllabus.

⁶This file is available from the contact author upon request.