Resources

Classroom Experiment - Urban Economics

Visualize the Bid-Rent curve around a City

The below shiny app is used to visualize a classroom experiment intended to explore bid rent functions. It shows a city with a single central business district with surrounding “identical” parcels that only vary by distance. In the experiment, students participate in a first-price sealed-bid auction with multiple winners to allocate the parcels. The application allows for the user to input a csv file of the student bids (collected from any online survey platform) to have the auction solved and visualized. I developed this application, and the paper, to meet a need for scalability of existing experiments to large classrooms (> 50 students). To learn more, check out the research tab!

Helpful Teaching Resources

Supply and Demand

Students often struggle visualizing how supply and demand curves operate. I find that giving students the opportunity to play around with an interactive equilibrium calculator, this one I put together using plotly, and giving them an assignment to articulate what it means as they adjust different parameters helps them to more quickly connect mathematics to economics.

Demand: P = a − b·Q

Supply: P = c + d·Q

Equilibrium:
Q* =
P* =
Equations:
Demand: P =
Supply: P =

Graphs, Games, and Books!!

Below is a ever growing list of resources that I use in my courses and you may find value in using them in yours!

Interactive Graphs

  • Econ Graphs: This site provides more graphs that students can play around with similar to the one above but without numbers at play.
  • Interactive Economics: Supplementary materials to lectures or textbook that has interactive figures often with real world data.
  • Econ Reimagined: Lots of Practice Questions!

Classroom Games/Simulations

OpenSource Textbooks