Handling math expressions in economics: recoding spreadsheet teaching tool of growth models

ABSTRACT

In the present paper, we develop a teaching methodology for economic theory. The main contribution of this paper relies on combining the interactive characteristics of spreadsheet programs such as Excel and Unicode plain-text linear format for mathematical expressions. The advantage of Unicode standard rests on its ease for writing and reading mathematical expressions. In this sense, our proposal allows incorporating an easily readable and writable methodology to cope with math expressions when interactive spreadsheets are used and designed in Economics teaching. The resulting nearly plain text can be used with few or no modifications in other numerical computing programs.

KEYWORDS:

• Teaching tool
• Unicode
• spreadsheet
• macroeconomic theory

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Ana I. Moro-Egido has a Ph.D. in Economics from Departamento de Fundamentos del Análisis Económico of the University of Alicante. She is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Economic Theory and History at the University of Granada. She has published several articles in a number of international journals of high scientific reputation in the area of Economics. Her research interests include dynamic macroeconomics, econometrics, privation, subjective well-being and economics of education.

Luis E. Pedauga has a Ph.D. in Economics from Departamento de Teoría e Historia Económica of the University of Granada. Before his arrival to Spain, he served at the Economic Research Department in the Central Bank of Venezuela from 2000 to 2008. From 2005 through the spring of 2008, he was also Instructor Professor of Econometric and Applied Multivariate Methods at the Catholic University Andrés Bello (Venezuela). His research interest includes financial macroeconomics, market power and financial stability in banking industries, and multivariate data analysis.

ORCID

Luis E. Pedauga http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1654-6804

Notes

1 A literature review covering three decades of the use of simulations in teaching economics can be found in Porter et al. (2004).

2 The research tools data analysis used was the SciVerse Scopus provided by ScienceDirect, giving us direct access to one of the biggest journal databases in social science between 1987 and 2013.

3 This refers to columns with Letters and rows with Numbers. For example, D3 refers to the cell at the intersection of column D and row 3.

4 The work of Sargent III (2010) is mostly dedicated to showing the advantage of Unicode Standard for editing and handling mathematical expressions in the Microsoft Word processing system, mentioning only the advantages of linear format in symbolic manipulation programs like Maple, Mathematica or Derive.

5 Excel from Microsoft is the most widespread software used in the industry, but our methodology can also be implemented in other open source programs such as Calc from OpenOffice.org or Gnumeric from the Gnome Free Software Desktop Project.

6 In particular, Microsoft Word uses the linear format described in Unicode Technical Note 28 (Sargent III, 2010) to build up and display mathematical expressions in “math zones.” This area is explicitly controlled by the user either with on-off characters as used in TEX or with a character format attribute as in other rich-text environments.

7 Common examples of time series denoted by just one symbol are: the Gross Domestic Product represented by , the Capital Stock by , the unemployment rate by , the interest rate by , among others.

8 With this notation it is intended that the student begins to be familiar with other notation programs. For example, in Stata the command l. is used to compute lags, the command f. for leads and d. for differences.

9 In the attached file none of the formula uses the A1 reference style.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Government of Spain through grant [ECO2012-33993] and Government of Spain through grant network MOMA under project [ECO2014-57673-REDT] through grant to Ana I. Moro-Egido is gratefully acknowledged.