Publications:
"Improving Outcomes: Promoting Distributed Practice in Introductory Economics". Australasian Journal of Educational Economics, 2021
“Macroeconomic Podcasts: Teaching the Internet Generation.” International Journal of Pluralism and Economics Education, 2021
“Using Podcasts to Teach the New Generations about Supply and Demand” Journal of Higher Education Theory and Practice, 2021
“Historical Social Stratification and Mobility in Costa Rica, 1840-2006", Economic History Review, 2020
“Economics Through Film: Thinking Like an Economist” International Review of Economics Education, 2020
“The new era of teaching: using video games to teach macroeconomics” Journal of Higher Education Theory and Practice, 2020
"Educating Beyond the Classroom: Alumni Giving and the Value of Campus Culture” with Thomas Pittz, Studies in Higher Education, 2018
“Surnames: A new source for the history of social mobility” with Gregory Clark, Neil Cummins and Yu Hao Ma, Explorations in Economic History, 2015.
"Chile: Mobility among the Oligarchs,” in Gregory Clark, Daniel Diaz Vidal, et al. The Son Also Rises: Surnames and the History of Social Mobility, Princeton University Press, 2015.
Current Research
"Using Cinematic Gangsters, Samurais and Robots to Teach Economics Through Film", with Robert Beekman
The economics education literature has been showing significant signs of a push away from traditional lectures, “chalk and talk”, to more innovative and attractive pedagogies that are more effective and better suited for the newer generations. This paper is another contribution to that trend in the literature as it invites the economics instructor to use films to teach economics. The paper introduces a number of movies and a documentary with a list of associated economic theories and concepts that can be related to specific clips. The paper is meant to serve as an invitation to the reader to use these examples in hope that she will create and disseminate her own examples as well.
"The Nature of Assortative Mating: A Surname Analysis” Daniel Diaz Vidal and
Gregory Clark
How closely matched are spouses in terms of social status? Studies that look at the spousal correlation in characteristics like education, intelligence, health, income and occupation find correlations in the range 0.2-0.6. If the matching is based on these characteristics the correlation of underlying genotypes will be much lower. Thus genetic correlations between a parent and subsequent generations will decline by nearly a half each generation. However, here we present evidence that the correlation of spouses on underlying characteristics is actually stronger than on individual elements of the phenotype. Thus the genetic correlation between spouses may indeed be high enough to make the genetic correlation between a parents and descendants high even across multiple generations.
According to my results, which are the basis for the graph to the left, the last socioeconomic echoes of the classic textbook social pyramid for colonial Chile would take about seven more generations to disappear. The privileged Spanish Encomenderos and the indigenous Mapuche, polar opposites in terms of socioeconomic status in the 16th century, still need 5-6 generations to meet in the average income.
Other Active Research Interests
- Continuing to study social mobility in the Latin American context.
- Working on a study of transatlantic returns to migration, with a particular emphasis on German migration to Chile and Brasil.
- Several projects on economics education.
- Studying the Inca economy and society.
