Economics - Faculty & Staff

Dr. Christie Byun's interests include the music industry, the fashion industry, intellectual property rights, and habit formation. She is interested in how the business side of the music industry and technology can influence the process of creating music. The second edition of her book, The Economics of the Popular Music Industry is now available on SpringerLink. She has also done research in environmental economics, and is interested in free market environmentalism and how markets can be used to determine efficient allocations of natural resources. Her teaching areas include Principles of Economics, Microeconomics, Macroeconomics, Econometrics, Statistics for the Social Sciences, Environmental Economics, Economics and Public Policy, the Economic Approach with Microsoft Excel, Freshman Tutorial (the Popular Music Industry), and Senior Seminar. Her most recent Freshman Tutorial course is called Fashion, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship: How to Dress Like a Gentleman in the 21st Century. This course investigated topics in history, economics, globalization, innovation, intellectual property, marketing, and communication, all through the lens of fashion. Students in the class experienced the fashion world directly by participating in a Wabash Magazine fashion shoot at Fusion54 and also by creating and presenting a campus fashion show. 

Dr. Byun strongly believes in the power of immersion learning and has led an immersion trip to Iceland for her Environmental Economics class to study renewable energy sources, environmental technology, and environmental conservation. See the photos from that trip here, here, and here. Her previous Environmental Economics immersion class traveled to Alaska where students met with representatives from the oil and natural resource industries, Native groups, and tourism industry groups. 

Dr. Byun has presented at various conferences, including the Midwest Economics Association, the 正规赌钱软件appstern Economic Association, and the St. Louis Federal Reserve Professors' Conference. She has sponsored student research presentations  at the Midwest Economics Association conference, the Indiana Academy of Social Sciences Annual Meeting, and the Wabash College Celebration of Student Research. She has also worked on interdisciplinary research with Dr. Ethan Hollander of the Political Science department on the causes of the Arab Spring uprisings in the Middle East. She is a faculty liaison for the Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession.