Joshua C. Hall

From Abba to Zeppelin, Led: Using Music to Teach Economics

The From ABBA to Zeppelin Weblog offers a variety of songs and lyrics that economics instructors might find useful. Song selections range from country to rock to rap. Each post includes a selection from the song (and a link to the full lyrics) and a brief assignment for students. JEL codes are provided so that instructors may assign certain songs based on the course content. This Weblog was created to facilitate the use of music in the economics classroom. In the interests of moving away from “chalk and talk,” we decided to join several recent educators who have developed approaches to teaching economics concepts that involve using popular music to engage their classes (Harter 2003; Kane 1999; Tinari and Khandke 2000). Our approach is detailed in the paper “From ABBA to Zeppelin: Using Popular Music to Teach Economics,” which is available on the Website. In our opinion, this Weblog complements all such attempts to use music in the classroom by providing additional examples that can be integrated into the curriculum.

Using The Simpsons to Improve Economic Instruction Through Policy Analysis

The analysis of public policy issues in the classroom can be a powerful tool to help students learn because it encourages students to actively apply classroom material. The television show The Simpsons provides several episodes that revolve around policy issues amenable to examination. Using The Simpsons to provide students with material for analysis has two advantages over traditional sources such as newspapers or magazines. First, a long-running and popular television show effectively engages students in a way traditional sources cannot. Second, the context of an animated television show can help students separate positive economic analysis from normative economic analysis.

Frictions in Polycentric Administration with Non-Congruent Borders: Evidence from Ohio School District Class Sizes

Public managers who operate within cross-jurisdictional governance regimes face substantial difficulties in facilitating network collaboration. Scholars have long suggested that non-congruence of geographic borders can create coordination problems among the political communities within polycentric administrative units. A frequently reoccurring example of such coordination problems arises in cases where municipalities and school districts have non-congruent borders, creating fiscal externalities in residential development land use decisions. Using GIS data from 611 Ohio school districts and 1,585 municipalities in 2000, we calculate the degree of non-congruence between school district and municipal territory to test for evidence that non-congruence of municipal-school district borders influences school district class size. The results indicate that schools with non-congruent borders do experience substantively larger class sizes. Furthermore, these effects seem to increase with the degree of non-congruence. Our findings are robust to model specification and consistent across OLS and treatment effects regression estimates. Policy implications for state-encouraged consolidation of school districts are discussed as well as theoretical and empirical implications of non-congruent jurisdictional borders for governance studies more generally.

Why are Some Places Rich While Others are Poor? The Institutional Necessity of Economic Freedom

We survey perspectives on the economic differences between countries and argue that economic freedom is the key to prosperity. We close by outlining the policy implications. Specifically, removing obstacles to the exercise of economic freedom is an important step towards prosperity. Copyright (c) 2010 The Authors. Journal compilation (c) Institute of Economic Affairs 2010. Published by Blackwell Publishing, Oxford.