THE USE OF EXPERIMENTS IN MACROECONOMICS COURSES

A relatively new resource for teaching Economics, available in internet, is experiments. There are several servers that offer platforms to run them. The only necessary thing is that teachers and students have connections to internet, all at the same time. This offers interesting opportunities for learning. For example, students can participate from home or from a coffee shop; they do not need to be in class. Another advantage is that experiments represent an alternative to traditional algebraic exercises solved in class. We can also argument disadvantages. I clear one is the relatively large amount of time necessary to run them. The paper will discuss and illustrate these advantages and disadvantages from my personal experience in the use of experiments available at the VeconLab (http://veconlab.econ.virginia.edu/admin.htm) in courses on Macroeconomics.