Teaching Macroeconomics after the Crisis

Influential newspapers and magazines, including THE ECONOMIST and THE NEW YORK TIMES, repeatedly asked whether the recent financial crisis will change how macroeconomics is taught at colleges and universities. This is an important question. To obtain representative answers, we prepared an online questionnaire that was sent to colleagues who teach undergraduate macroeconomics at colleges and universities in the US and Europe.

The questionnaire comprises three segments. The first asks for general perceptions of how serious the crisis actually was and still is, and of the current state of macroeconomic research and policy. The second part tries to identify the current mandatory macroeconomic curriculum for undergraduates at the respondent's university or college, and how that curriculum has changed after the crisis. Part three collects some structural information, such as class size, age group, country etc. A static version of the questionnaire can be found at: www.fgn.unisg.ch/public/questionnaire.pdf.

We invited  760 undergraduate instructors teaching mandatory macroeconomics courses at 510 universities in Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the U.K. and the US to participate in our survey. The questionnaire was open between 11 November and 10 December 2010. The statistical analysis of responses has only just begun.

Some 255 instructors, about 35 percent of those invited, completed the questionnaire. Preliminary analysis of the data lets us expect to derive quite interesting results as we observe a high variance among the responses. For example, there is no consensus as to whether in November 2010 the crisis is considered over or not. 120 respondents 'agree' or 'rather agree' that the 'worst part is over', compared to 93 instructors who 'disagree' or 'rather' disagree. Beyond structured responses we have also received a great amount of positive feedback either by email or in a free text field provided in the questionnaire.

In the proposed paper we intend to provide both descriptive statistics as well as correlations between the different variables quantified in our survey. We hope to identify the profiles of post-crisis undergraduate macroeconomics instruction and check how they compare to the situation before the crisis. We will also test for differences between Europe and the US, between Continental Europe and the British Isles, and between leading research universities and other institutions.