Description

This paper conducts a ten-year bibliometric analysis of Economics Letters journal to uncover the emerging trends in economic research, as well as their specifics. The results of the co-citation and co-word analysis provide information on the most popular references, scholarly approved journals and trendiest economics fields. For example, monetary policy is a highly investigated field, while panel data analysis and experiments are the most used statistical methods. These results could serve scholars as a guide by putting their scientific work in the current perspective and aiding them to discover future research paths.

Construction of the Movement’s Collective Self

Following della Porta and Pavan progressive social movements act as laboratories of innovation and knowledge creation in their pursuit to reform or resist societal structures. Simultaneously, movements are increasingly dependent upon digital tools and platforms, including social media, in their effort to organize, diffuse and saturate their agendas. Through an analysis of Rethinking Economics’ internet memes from 2019, the article investigates how internet memes contribute to a construction of the movement’s collective self. Memes characterize a relatively new form of online culture that offers affordable venues of expression, engagement and participation especially apt for bottom-up initiatives with limited funds. My focus is on the internet memes’ potential for deliberation and knowledge exchange; essentially their potential as supplementary knowledge practice. The article analyzes the narratives and legitimation strategies embedded in Rethinking Economics’ internet memes by using Van Leeuwen’s framework. The study suggests that internet memes’ distilled communicative qualities qualify them as informal venues for confrontation and learning, in which local movement identification and positionality are both developed, sustained and evaluated. The first economics editor of the journal Chaos, Solutions & Fractals, propounded a deeply insightful vision of how arts, sciences, and economics evolve in similar patterns, with developments in one interpenetrating into another to form a vast coevolution. These connections lie largely beneath the surface and are not noticed by most participating in these various sub-parts of this grand process. Puu has laid this argument out in a book named Arts, Sciences, and Economics: A Historical Safari, which went through two editions following on an early article in the Journal of Cultural Economics. A crucial element of this vision is the argument that various forms of nonlinear dynamics, including chaos and fractals among others, play deep and crucial roles in both the forms these evolutionary processes take, as well as in the ways these links between these different broad fields operate. An important aspect of Puu's advocacy of this vision is that he himself personally characterized it and assisted it himself personally. His main profession was that of an economist who would apply ideas of complex nonlinear dynamics to such fields as urban and regional economics spatial patterns, macroeconomic fluctuations and industrial organization dynamics. But he also led another life in the world of music. This partly took the form of for many years organizing an annual festival that featured Renaissance and Baroque music in Umeä, Sweden, where he taught for most of his career at the university there. However, he also made musical instruments played in those eras, including viols and even harpsichords, with these of such high quality that professional musicians paid him to purchase these from him. His discussion of the history of harpsichords in his book in both editions reflects an intimate and personal knowledge based on this experience. He was himself a player in this interchange between at least music and economics.

Economics in a Way that Future Employers will Value

It has long been said that the best way to learn economics is to “do economics” which in recent years includes working with large datasets. The growing emphasis on data proficiency and careful empirical analysis in the discipline has led economics educators to promote more research in undergraduate economics programs. Undergraduate research follows an approach similar to professional academics. Students identify a research question, form a testable hypothesis, identify and analyze appropriate data to answer it, and write a formal research paper targeted to other economists. Traditional undergraduate research projects aim to elicit many of the higher-order proficiencies outlined by Hansen and emphasize data literacy and critical thinking skills. Recently, economics educators have recognized that alternative models of capstone experiences can meet similar objectives as those elicited in traditional undergraduate research. For example, Morreale and Shostya present a capstone experience focused on public policy. Their policy-focused classroom experiences showed that students could meet high Hansen proficiencies and provide students with a head start in their careers. The authors endorse the idea that a well-designed capstone tests a student’s ability to do economics in a way that future employers will value. Others have shared this sentiment. For example, Raymond et al. suggest that educators can enhance the depth of capstone projects by assigning projects with real-world applications. Similarly, Allard and Straussman argue that capstone projects should expose students to professional work. Course experiences that have career value and highlight real-world relevance have also recently been shown to broaden the appeal of economics to a more diverse group of students. This paper illustrates how the case method can be adapted as a course-embedded undergraduate research experience. We share an example capstone project we developed in an upper-level economic consulting course for our Bachelor of Science in Business Administration (BSBA) major in economic consulting. The BSBA major develops the same critical thinking skills as our traditional BA major but has a specialized and applied focus. It has as its learning goals to: (1) develop students with expertise in solving complex and ill-structured problems commonly faced in modern businesses, (2) develop students with quantitative and analytical methods of applied business economics, and (3) develop students with the ability to communicate strategic recommendations to business clients. BSBA students are required to take econometrics, but unlike our BA students, they are not required to complete an undergraduate thesis paper.1 Like a traditional thesis capstone, our experience requires students to apply the knowledge and skills from their previous courses in a final semester-long project. The course capstone project is also designed to achieve similar learning goals as a thesis, and it uses recently suggested sequenced project design and replication strategies.