This
post is joint with André Moreira, an economist at the Bank of
England
Three years ago one of us got into a discussion
with Paul Krugman and Brad DeLong about how dominant, or otherwise,
the New Keynesian model of business cycles was in academia. That post
contained a footnote with an idea: why don’t we look at what the
top schools actually teach their post graduates, to see if there are
a large proportion of students who are not being taught any Keynesian
economics. We came together with the idea of doing just that.
We initially thought that we could do this by ‘simply’ contacting
the academics teaching core macro courses and asking them for their
syllabus. You can probably guess the problem we encountered, although
thanks to those who did respond. So instead we decided to survey
recent students. That worked much better, with one exception we note below. (The results are written up in more detail as a short
paper
– see the top of the main list from this link).
We decided to ask a simple question: “Approximately what percentage
of the core Macro sequence that you received covered models involving
price and/or wage rigidities (including New Keynesian models)? Please
round your answer to the nearest 5% mark.” We sent this question to
graduate students at the top 15 schools during 2014/15 [1]. Here are
the results
Table
2: Survey results
The one school missing is Chicago. Contact information for these
graduates is not publicly available, and we were told by both the
course administrator and the academic in charge of the course that
they have a policy of not divulging the email addresses of
postgraduates, even after we made it clear what we wanted them for.
We also received no information from our earlier requests for a
syllabus.
Of course no simple question like this is perfect: at NYU, for
example, the first year teaching focuses on methods, and Keynesian
analysis is covered in a later (but optional) course. We found no
major discontinuities according to the year students entered the
programme (a few variations are noted in the paper), and the
information matched the syllabus information from those who had been
good enough to respond to our first survey. We sent the results to
course teachers a few months ago for any comments or corrections.
The main message we draw from these results is that, in at least the
top schools, there is no major divide between a group that teaches
Keynesian economics and those that do not. There is a large amount of
variation among schools, but there is little evidence of the marked
bifurcation among top universities that some discussions of a saltwater/freshwater divide might suggest. We suspect opinions will
differ on whether the variation we still found is natural in a discipline like
economics or is an indication that something is wrong.
We would be interested in any thoughts about whether it would be
worth taking this analysis further in any way.
[1] Top 15 according to the IDEAS ranking of economic institutions
as of September 2013.
