Bill Goffe

William L. Goffe
Associate Teaching Professor
Department of Economics
Penn State University
814-867-3299 (voice)
315-657-5014 (cell)
bill.goffe@psu.edu

Internet Activities

I edit "Resources for Economists on the Internet," which is sponsored by the American Economic Association. Its main site has the easy to remember address rfe.org.

Research

Besides teaching and working on various Internet activities, I conduct research in economics education (and computational economics in the past).

• "Beyond the Flipped Class: the Impact of Research-Based Teaching Methods in a Macroeconomics Principles Class" (with Austin Boyle, American Economic Association, Papers and Proceedings, May, 2018)
• "Preconceptions of Principles Students" (with Douglas Bice, Elisabeth S. Curtis, Wayne Geerling, Adam Hoffer, Solina Lindahl, Mark Maier, Brain Peterson, and Wendy Stock, 5/2014)
• "Non-Cognitive Skills and the Performance of Macro Principles Students" (with Deborah Goins, 5/2014)
• "A Survey of Principles Instructors: Why Lecture Prevails" (with David Kauper, 5/2013)
• "Initial Misconceptions in a Macro Principles Class" (5/2013)
• "Next Steps in the Information Infrastructure in Economics" (2/2008)
• "Redesigning a Large Macro Principles Course Using Bain's What the Best College Teachers Do" (12/2007)
• "Multi-core CPUs, Clusters, and Grid Computing: A Tutorial," Computational Economics, Volume 32, Number 4, November, 2008)
• "Valuation of Non-Market Goods Using Computer-Assisted Surveys: A Comparison of Data Quality from Internet and RDD Samples" (with Mark Dickie and Shelby Gerking, 1/2007)
• "Teaching with Technology: May You Live in Interesting Times" (7/2004; with Kim Sosin) (Chapter in Engaging Teaching Methods for Undergraduate Economics Courses: More Alternatives to Chalk and Talk, William Becker, and Michael Watts, editors, Edward Elgar Press, 2005. An abridged version appeared in the Journal of Economic Education, Summer, 2005.)
• "The Internet and the American Economic Association – A Set of Proposals" (4/2004; a subsequent version appeared in the Social Science Computer Review, Winter 2004)
• "Visualizing Multi-Dimensional Surfaces in Economics" (PDF format) (PostScript format)
• "A Toolkit for Optimizing Functions in Economics" (1999)
• "The Future Information Infrastructure in Economics," (with Bob Parks), Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer, 1997, vol. 11, no. 3, pp. 75-94 (note that PDF and HTML versions with links are available here)
• "SIMANN:  A Global Optimization Algorithm using Simulated Annealing," Studies in Nonlinear Dynamics and Econometrics, vol. 1, no. 3, 1996.
• SIMANN: Fortran simulated annealing code used in "Global Optimization of Statistical Functions with Simulated Annealing" (preprint; with Gary Ferrier and John Rogers) Journal of Econometrics, vol. 60, no. 1/2, Jan./Feb. 1994, pp. 65-99. C, Matlab, and GAUSS versions are available on request.

Service

I'm the Secretary-Treasurer of the Society for Computational Economics, a society devoted to the intersection of economics and computational methods. Among my duties are maintaining its website.

Vita