(2) Teaching Economics with Excel

Teaching Economics with Excel

This book is a resource for professors. It explains how the Excel files on this web site can be used in a variety of ways to help students learn. The files are standalone and freely available. They use Visual Basic code to support buttons, scroll bars, and other controls to create sophisticated Excel implementations of core macro models such as the Solow and Keynesian models. They also rely heavily on real-world data and there is an emphasis on basic understanding of historical trends and the current economic environment.

The Excel workbooks contain text and links to short video clips that demonstrate how to use the files. They also have tasks for students to practice and extend the material in the videos. The Screencasts page has a complete listiing of all of the videos.


I use video to reach my students. All the professor has to do is send students a link to an Excel workbook and tell them which screencasts to watch and tasks to do. Or, she can use the Excel files in a lecture or in a lab setting. Or, she can flip the classroom and assign several screencasts as homework and have students come to class and work on tasks and discuss the material.

And what about the book itself? It is for teachers, not students. The book will enable professors to get a quick, overall view of what is in each Excel workbook and has suggestions for teaching the material. It will make little sense to students and non-economists, but should enable an instructor interested in moving beyond chalk-and-talk to experiment and improve his teaching.

More detail on the philosophy behind the book and how to use the Excel files is here: IntroductoryMatter.pdf. Or, if you prefer watching a video, here you go:

For more on how I use Excel to teach Economics, please visit my Econ Excel page.

All comments welcome.

Humberto Barreto
DePauw University
765-658-4531
hbarreto@depauw.edu

This web site supports Intermediate Microeconomics with Microsoft Excel, Cambridge University Press, 2009.
This book is based on the idea that there is a particular framework used by economists to interpret observed reality. This framework has been called the economic way of thinking, the economic approach, and the method of economics.

This book is different from the many other books that attempt to teach microeconomics in three ways:

• It explicitly applies the recipe of the economic approach in every example.
• It uses concrete examples via Microsoft Excel in every application, which enables the reader to manipulate live graphs and learn numerical methods of optimization.
• It is written in a terse, word-minimizing fashion. The majority of the content is in the Excel workbooks that accompany the book.

You learn by doing, not by reading.

About the Author
Humberto Barreto is the Elizabeth P. Allen Distinguished University Professor at DePauw University. He was born in Camagüey, Cuba, and earned his B.A. from New College and Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Bert manages an email list for the History of Economics Societyand is co-author (with Frank M. Howland) of Introductory Econometrics Using Monte Carlo Simulation with Microsoft Excel.

http://www.depauw.edu/site/learn/macroexcel/
https://www.depauw.edu/learn/microexcel/
https://www.depauw.edu/learn/econexcel/index.htm