Starting Monday, I am teaching a new course on Sports Economics – EC310F. A recent draft of the course outline is available on the EC310F page on this site, or (for students in the course), on MyLearningSpace.
A couple of weeks ago, I posted a request on LinkedIn for any suggestions that people have for the course – guest speakers, topics to cover, suggestions of things that people in industry wish they had known before they started. The response to that post was quite positive, and since I have this outlet, I am going to use this site as a secondary outlet to talk through course concepts, my ideas about teaching and some other stuff. As such, this will likely be fairly academic, but will include some discussion of sports content.
Current students will find everything that they need for the course on MyLearningSpace – if something is posted here but not on MyLearningSpace, I won’t expect you to have read it. This is intended to be a little more free-form, and available to anyone that wants to participate. Comments are appreciated, but also (lightly) moderated, so it may take some time for them to show up. Anyone looking for a response from me would be better off to e-mail me anyway.
Course Structure
Part A – Economic Analysis and Sports
The first half of the course focuses on the economic tools for analysis in the context of sports – mostly microeconomics topics such as game theory (both simultaneous and sequential games), market structure analysis, labour markets and also just enough macroeconomics to understand why the public finance of stadiums and/or teams won’t lead to economic growth.
Part B – Critical Thinking and Communicating Economic Ideas
The second half of the course is based on the idea that Sports can provide a medium to learn to convey economic ideas to a non-economic audience. There is a vast audience of non-economists that are open to understanding economic concepts in the context of their favourite team – students need to learn to write for that audience, as they will probably end up working for or with that audience at some point in the future. The challenge hear is to convey an economic idea without sounding condescending, or overly scientific. I am not sure that I am good at this – it is probably something that most of us could practice more.
As I indicated on the LinkedIn post, the course design is fairly flexible – there are specific concepts that I am planning to cover, but I am open to adjusting to include topics that I might not have considered yet.