Bill Goffe

William L. Goffe
Professor
Department of Economics
416 Mahar Hall
SUNY Oswego
Oswego, NY 13126
315-312-3444 (voice)
315-341-5444 (fax)
goffe@oswego.edu

Teaching

Spring 2012 office hours: Monday 1:30 - 4:30 and Tuesday/Thursday 1:00 to 3:00 (in the Lake Effect Cafe) and by appointment. Unless I make an announcement, I'll be in my office at those times and you're free to come by without letting me know first.

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. You might also want to check out the Economics Search Engine.

Research – Papers

Besides work on various Internet activities, I do research in computational economics and economics education.

"Initial Misconceptions in a Macro Principles Class" (12/2009)
"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.

Research – Links

Economics Misconceptions Database – this allows researchers to enter and see common misconceptions of economics principles students. It is based on "Initial Misconceptions in a Macro Principles Class"
Several Resources on Teaching Methods that Increase Student Learning – largely a story about how physicists have learned how to increase student learning

Service

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

Notes to Talks

"My Evolution as a Teacher," TCU, 3/13/09

Vita

Photos

I have recently gotten back into photography with an Olympus EVOLT E-500:

CNN