Our experience with business and economic students indicates limited understanding and confidence when working with macroeconomic data such as unemployment rate, labor force participation rate, business cycles, and price indexes. To close this gap, the authors have developed and evaluated a college classroom experiential activity defined as the Storytelling Project (SP) conducted in nine principles of economics courses in a mid-size private university over a period of two years during the COVID-19 pandemic. In the SP, students wrote personal stories that assisted them in connecting with their audience and then visually presented complex economic data. A workbook supplemented the SP with learning objectives, tasks, multiple examples of data analysis, storytelling techniques, and videos. Participants completed a self-efficacy and attitude survey of perceived cognition, confidence, and motivation and took an assessment to evaluate cognitive competencies. The survey and assessment results were compared against students who did not complete the SP. Our results indicate that the SP and the workbook are effective experiential learning activities that improve data analysis and communication skills among college students. Students show more confidence and motivation in macroeconomics and data analysis at the end of the semester. Knowledge or cognitive competency is ranked higher among those completing the SP.

Rent-seeking behavior is when individuals or firms acquire above-market returns by exercising economic and political power. We introduce an active-learning exercise, with discussion questions and extensions, to illustrate implications of rent seeking for efficiency, equity, economic justice, and democracy. Students act as corporate decision makers allocating resources among physical, financial, and political investment. Instructors use the results to highlight distinctions between productive and nonproductive activities, and ways in which individual firm incentives may differ from socially optimal firm behavior. This allows for discussions of broader issues, such as how rent seeking can undermine democratic ideals and perpetuate inequality.

We find that routine-biased technological change decreases the employment-to-population ratio of foreign-born population over the last three decades (1980–2010). This impact is greater for foreign-born population with lower English proficiency. As computerization and automation substitute for workers in routine occupations, switching from routine jobs to non-routine cognitive jobs may be more challenging for foreign-born workers than for native workers.

We investigate the effectiveness of seven government containment and policy closure interventions against the novel coronavirus (SARS-COV-2) pandemic in the OECD countries, at several different time horizons. Our results indicate that only school closings and public transportation closings have a persistently significant impact. Stay-at-home policies only show a significant impact after 70 days. Workplace closings, restrictions on the size of gatherings, and restrictions on internal travel show no significant impact on mortality rates. Moreover, stricter measures are not significantly associated with lower growth rates in mortality.

The relationship between gambling and health has important economic and public policy implications. We develop causal evidence on this relationship exploiting regional variation in access to legal gambling. Empirical models treat gambling as an endogenous regressor in explaining variation in health outcomes. Results from instrumental variable and bivariate probit models show recreational gambling has no or a negative impact on the probability of having certain chronic health conditions and a positive impact on life satisfaction. Past research generally found a positive association between problem gambling and adverse health outcomes. The generation of some positive health benefits provides important context for the expansion of legal sports betting in the USA following the repeal of the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act in 2018.