Eric Fischer if one of the winners to be selected for the first cohort of the new Chancellor’s Graduate Teaching Fellows program. Eric Fischer was awarded a Chancellors Teaching Fellowship to offer the following course as discovery research seminar.
The principal aim of this research “discovery seminar” is to develop the skills and techniques for carrying out a substantive original research project in economics with a focus on financial crises. This course is open to majors and non-majors and will include hands-on, experiential, collaborative learning and research activity on the seminar topic. Along the way, students will learn to evaluate scholarly literature, formulate and model a hypothesis, locate data and test the hypothesis, write an elegant paper and give a convincing presentation. This course provides undergraduate students with an introduction to the world of scholarly research.
The topic of this seminar explores the reasons behind economic bubbles and crashes since the Great Depression and considers the different responses of governments and central banks to these fluctuations. This is an ideal course for anyone who wants to learn about economic theory and philosophy, bubbles and crashes, research on financial crises, and the policy responses and moral issues. The financial crisis has illustrated that no economic paradigm has enough of the answers to define what is and is not economics. Instead students must draw upon a broader range of theories and toolkit to critically evaluate, compare and judge which theories provide answers to the phenomena that constitute our economies.
This courses is divided into four parts:
- Research methods
- Economic theory and philosophy
- Bubbles, crashes, and financial crises
- Policy responses and moral issues.
The seminar will allow an enrollment of 20 students and it will be offered in Winter 2015 or Spring 2015. Quarter is still to be determined.
