Alexander Dentler

Teaching

Teaching

Philosophy

I teach economics as a toolkit for understanding institutions, markets, and real data. Courses are founded in theory, data-driven, visual, and application-oriented: the goal is not only theoretical clarity but the ability to move from a puzzle to abstraction, from evidence to argument, visual and otherwise.

Transfer over coverage

The most important content is not a particular topic but the ability to apply economic principles to new problems — better to work through a few models deeply than to check off a syllabus. I treat not-knowing as a starting point rather than a deficit and design tasks that require judgment rather than a single correct answer, so that students learn to work with uncertainty rather than around it. Didactically I follow Pólya’s heuristic principles: questions instead of instructions, help without preempting the solution, and the same guiding questions repeated until they become second nature.

Iteration

Students should be able to research an economic question independently, build an argument, and defend it in a policy brief or a data-driven visualization. The path there is iterative: application, structured peer and instructor feedback, revision — until visible progress emerges. Former research assistants have gone on to graduate programs at Penn State, Toulouse, and MIT. More broadly, I aim to leave students with work they can show.

Signature Project

The Data Visualization Project

A staged semester project used across my courses

A centerpiece assignment used across courses and later showcased through @LiquidMexico. Student teams find data in the wild, evaluate its quality, understand the economics behind it, build a visual argument, and iterate against a structured rubric until it holds. Research design, programming, teamwork, and communication at once — a good project can become the first step toward a thesis.

Working paper Presentation Assignment handout Presentation source (LaTeX)

Courses

Monetary Theory and Policy

Undergraduate · CIDE

Central banking, interest-rate rules, inflation targeting, and the institutional design of monetary policy. Integrates data visualization projects and invited practitioners from Banco de México and the BIS.

Lecture Notes

International Trade

Undergraduate · CIDE & El Colegio de México

Classical and new trade theory, gravity models, trade policy. Students work with real trade data and produce visual arguments about openness, comparative advantage, and the distributional effects of trade.

Topics in Macroeconomics: Search Theory

Graduate · CIDE

Matching and frictional models with applications in monetary economics, labor, and housing. Students move from the canonical logic of search and bargaining toward concrete questions about liquidity, unemployment, vacancy creation, and idle capacity — the same frictions that platforms like Airbnb and Uber are designed to resolve. The course bridges abstract theory and applied intuition: a compact model that travels across fields once you understand the structure of frictions, information, and strategic behavior.

Pedagogy

Learn by Code: The Delta Method

Theory + MATLAB + Python

Self-contained econometrics modules pairing theory with working code. Each module follows a layered structure: a minimal working example, an explanatory walkthrough, a theory document, and a full toolbox — every layer complete on its own. The first module covers variance estimation for transformed parameters via Taylor expansion, including the linear case, numerical Jacobians, the smooth function model, and a collinearity analogy for singular transformations.

Read online PDF Code (GitHub)