Case Studies Final Year Economics

David Madden and myself have been working on a final year single honours option that is intended to provide direct experience of research and policy analysis. I posted before on aspects of it, including getting the students to participate in journal clubs and present to the class on key ideas from the papers and so on. Another aspect of the class involves preparing, in groups, a memo about a key issue in the current economy framed in the form of a case study concerning real-time issues requiring them to report to a key decision maker. All of the case studies, for this round, are focused on domestic economy issues. The aim is not to elicit novel empirical research (this comes later) but to simulate research environments that involve putting together documents that summarise existing knowledge from credible sources in academic and policy publications. All groups will have to present on their memo and answer questions and so on.

The five we have chosen (heavily condensed):

1. Irish bond yields are a key aspect of contemporary debate. The first group needs to examine the main measures of bond yields, the main theories on what drives bond yields and to provide a memo to the Minister for Finance on the likely effect of a range of fiscal and monetary measures on the cost of borrowing.

2. The second group needs to prepare a memo on current Irish banking policy including the merits of the national asset management agency and the set of banking guarantees.

3. The third group is examining the extent to which Ireland is "overtaxed"through comparing tax rates across a wide range of categories and countries and examining underlying principles that should guide the setting of taxation.

4. The fourth group is examining measures of educational performance and the extent to which Ireland compares on different measures.

5. The fifth group is examining the current unemployment problem and writing a memo on the various approaches to short-run employment policy and their potential efficacy in Ireland.

Case Studies

Kevin raised the issue of case studies in psychology as a research tool. Another prominent use of the case study method is in business schools, particularly for MBA classes. These are essentially vignettes, often based on actual events, where students are presented with real-world business dilemmas and asked to come up with solutions in time-pressured environments working either individually or in teams. Some examples of the Harvard case studies are linked here. Case studies are less prominently used in teaching Economics (though examples welcome). There are a lot of potential advantages to integrating them in that they encourage a lot of debate and force people to think about how textbook material applies in less defined settings.

Case studies

Case studies play no role in economics although there is some similarity with the "natural experiments" that are popular with some econometricians. In psychology, however, case studies have been very influential for example lesion studies where an individual's capacities have been compromised by some insult. Phineas Gage is the most famous perhaps. BBC Radio 4 is broadcasting a series on classic case studies that are well known in psychology. They include the case of a man who's vision was restored after 50 years, leading to an unhappy outcome, and Dora the famous patient of Freud, an association that also did not work out particularly well.