Teaching Economics with Breaking Bad

This paper builds on the existing literature, to expand the stock of “chalk-and-talk” alternatives and reduce the cost of implementing such alternatives. Specifically, the paper proposes three lesson plans that are based on a series of Breaking Bad scenes identified in Duncan, Muchiri and Paraschiv (2020) and featured as part of the associated online companion, BreakingBadEcon.com. The lesson plans rely on the economic content within the scenes to introduce and emphasize a notable array of microeconomic concepts while also facilitating the assessment of concept comprehension and student learning.