If you’re a regular follower of audioecon, you’ll notice some updates to our site this month (March 2023). We recognize that, while students are increasingly eager to connect the classroom with current events, incorporating interesting, relevant daily or weekly news can be a heavy lift for professors.
We’ve often included ‘teaching ideas’ in the past to ease the load for instructors wanting to incorporate relevant podcast content into classroom learning and assignments through discussions, reflections, etc. (see the ‘teaching ideas’ category for a full list). Based on feedback, we’ll now be including teaching ideas with every new Audioecon.com post. Follow the ‘teaching ideas’ link on each new post to find :
a few “listening check” multiple-choice questions that incentivize careful pre-class listening,
suggestions for an in class teaching idea (~10 minutes of class time) which may include discussion ideas, numerical problems, data analysis, and graphical or other quantitative problems.
This will facilitate your efforts to help students digest the podcast content and merge it meaningfully with class concepts. We hope this helps you easily infuse fresh examples and applications into your curriculum!
P.S. if you’re a subscriber to audioecon, you may get a few extra email updates in the coming week or so as we add a healthy dose of fresh content. After that things will go back to normal! Apologies and thanks for your patience.
Summary: More on banking! Specifically more about a crucial job in the economy’s financial regulation ecosystem– the bank examiner. We hear about a “natural experiment” that shows that, in the absence of bank examiners, banks basically acted liked kids throwing spitballs in a classroom without a teacher! We also hear that we will likely face a shortage of bank examiners in the future. Uh oh! Inspired by this fact, our teaching idea is a career-exploration exercise created by Prof. Natalia Smirnova. Students use the rich BLS data to explore their own futures.
Summary: Another chapter in the Banking Turmoil of 2023– the end of Credit Suisse, a long-standing Swiss banking institution. The Indicator recaps how it got to the end of a road full of bad bets, unprofitable lending and scandal. We also hear about the discomfort in markets in the aftermath of the UBS-Credit Suisse merger down due to the write-down of “CoCo” bonds We seized this opportunity to create a quick, refresher (or even intro!) exercise on capital structure.
Summary: The latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report is out, and the scientists have delivered their “final” warning, calling for aggressive actions to reduce carbon emissions. This episode of The Indicator which aired during last fall’s COP27 climate summit explores a radical but intriguing idea– the “Carbon Coin,” which leverages the power of monetary (and fiscal) policy to bring about large-scale carbon reduction. The accompanying exercise explores the carbon coin and how it compares to currency that we know and use today?
Summary: And the “Beigie” Award goes to…. the Minneapolis Fed!! The Beige Book provides a snapshot of economic activity in the different Federal Reserve Districts every six weeks. Importantly, it does in a very qualitatively, often featuring anecdotes or observations from regional businesses. The Indicator’s favorite entry for this edition described both sides of the tight labor market. Employers enlisting private jets to fly workers to construction sites and fed-up hospitality workers starting their own businesses. We describe how you can set-up your own Beigie Award activity in class!
Summary: The Inflation Reduction Act allows Medicare to negotiate the price of some drugs. What if this happened at a larger scale? The dismal answer would be “less incentive for pharma to innovate.” Yes, there is no such thing as a free lunch, but what about a cheaper lunch? The Indicator offers an optimistic view and our classroom exercise analyzes these policy ideas that may offer a solution to this “knotty” dilemma between prices and new drugs.
Summary: February inflation numbers are out and the bottom line is that inflation remains stubbornly high. However, the Fed’s job, laser focused on price stability till now, gets complicated in the aftermath of the SVB collapse. Today’s exercise asks students to debate whether the Fed should pause interest rate hikes as it weighs the tradeoffs between fighting inflation and stressing bank balance sheets.
Summary: A discussion of this week’s current events without SVB would be incomplete! The Indicator boils down SVB’s problems to three key points. In the Teaching Ideas exercise, students will use SVB’s actual 2022 balance sheet to learn how a seemingly dramatic and complicated phenomenon like a bank failure still just boils down to the bread-n-butter basics!
Summary: Why are some countries rich, and others poor? This episode “digs” into this classic question by looking at the case of Peru and Bolivia and the work Melissa Dell. Her research studies the persistent differences in economic development that can be linked to historical events and economic activity over four hundred years ago. The accompanying Team-Based Learning exercise asks students to put their policy hat on. Detailed Teaching Notes included!
Summary: The February job numbers are out! While they are very strong and beat expectations, the labor force participation rate still remains below pre-pandemic levels. This episode hears five different stories and explores three different explanations for the “missing workers.” The quick, accompanying exercise asks students to explore FRED data and flesh out the story.
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