Fourteen economics simulators, mapped to a syllabus
Everything here is free, opens in a browser, and needs no account. Nothing a student types is transmitted anywhere, so there is no data agreement to sign and nothing for your institution to review. This page exists so you can find the one model that fits the week you are teaching without opening all fourteen.
Intro micro
| Topic | Model | What students can do with it |
|---|---|---|
| Scarcity, opportunity cost, the PPF | Comparative Advantage | Set each country's productivity and watch the production frontier and the consumption frontier separate. |
| Supply, demand, surplus | Supply and Demand | Drag either curve and read consumer and producer surplus straight off the diagram. |
| Elasticity and tax incidence | Supply and Demand | Change how responsive each side is, then apply a tax and see which side actually pays it. |
| Price ceilings and floors | Supply and Demand | Impose a rent ceiling or a minimum wage and measure the shortage and the deadweight loss. |
| Costs of production | Production Costs | See marginal, average variable and average total cost come out of one cost function, and why marginal cuts average at its minimum. |
| Perfect competition, the shutdown decision | Production Costs | Find the shutdown point and the break-even price, and show why fixed costs do not enter the decision at all. |
| Monopoly and market power | Monopoly | Compare monopoly output against the competitive quantity, and measure the welfare the restriction destroys. |
| Game theory and oligopoly | Game Theory Solver | Type any payoff matrix and get dominant strategies, every pure and mixed Nash equilibrium, and which outcomes are Pareto inefficient. |
| Externalities and market failure | Externalities | Set an external cost, size the corrective tax, and show a case where a tax raises total welfare instead of lowering it. |
| Income distribution | Lorenz Curve and Gini | Build a Lorenz curve, read the Gini and Palma ratio, then apply a tax and transfer and watch both move. |
Intro macro and international
| Topic | Model | What students can do with it |
|---|---|---|
| Aggregate demand and the output gap | Macro Policy | Move spending, taxes and the interest rate, and watch output, inflation and unemployment respond over quarters rather than instantly. |
| Unemployment and Okun's law | Macro Policy | Read unemployment off the output gap, and see how far policy has to move to shift it. |
| Inflation and the Phillips curve | Macro Policy | Run the tradeoff directly, including the case where a supply shock raises inflation and unemployment together. |
| Monetary policy and the Taylor rule | Macro Policy | Compare the rate students choose against the Taylor rule benchmark shown alongside it. |
| Gains from trade | Comparative Advantage | Show a country worse at producing everything still gaining, and pick terms of trade that split the gain. |
| Tariffs, quotas and protection | Tariffs and Quotas | Split the cost of a tariff into producer gain, government revenue and the part that reaches nobody, then compare an equivalent quota. |
Corporate finance and investments
| Topic | Model | What students can do with it |
|---|---|---|
| Valuation, WACC and CAPM | Discounted Cash Flow | Build the discount rate from its parts, choose between perpetuity growth and an exit multiple, and see how far the answer moves when two assumptions shift. |
| Bond pricing and yield to maturity | Bonds and the Yield Curve | Price a bond, then check duration and convexity against a full repricing rather than taking the approximation on trust. |
| Term structure and forward rates | Bonds and the Yield Curve | Invert the curve and read the forward rates implied by it. |
| Portfolio theory and diversification | Efficient Frontier | Drag correlation and watch two risky assets combine into a portfolio safer than either alone, then find where that stops working. |
| Risk over time and Monte Carlo | Sequence-of-Returns Risk | Run a thousand paths at the same average return and show why the order of returns changes the outcome. |
| Break-even and managerial decisions | Business Strategy | Set price, headcount, marketing and R&D each quarter against a rival that responds, and find what actually covers fixed costs. |
Three ways these get used
On the projector. Every model has presets, so a demonstration does not depend on typing numbers correctly in front of a room. Load the preset, ask the room to predict what moves, then move it.
As a homework prompt. Ask for a specific number and the reasoning behind it. "Set the external cost to $6 and report the corrective tax, the quantity before and after, and the welfare change" has one right answer that a student has to operate the model to find.
As the counterexample. Several models are built to show where the textbook result stops holding. The tariff page has a region where the diagram does not apply and says so. The inequality page shows two distributions with an identical Gini that look nothing alike. Those are usually the more useful ten minutes.
There is a whole course for that
The fourteen models above are built for an economics syllabus. Personal finance is a different course with different standards, so it has its own thing here: CompoundPath, seven modules on how early money decisions compound, ending in a life simulation that runs seventy years of them.
It comes with the parts a teacher actually needs rather than just the student pages: a planning guide saying what each part needs and what students get wrong, printable answer keys generated from the same models the students use, a projectable deck, and a standards map against the 2021 National Standards for Personal Financial Education.
Why the numbers can be trusted
Every model here is checked against a closed-form solution or a second implementation written to disagree with the first, and the standard is published rather than asserted, together with the errors it caught before anything went live. If you are going to put a tool in front of a class, you should be able to see how it was checked.
Read how it is checked Browse all fourteen
Corrections are welcome and get fixed quickly. If a model disagrees with your textbook, that is worth an email either way: sometimes the textbook is simplifying, and sometimes the model is wrong.
Using these with a class?
I would like to know which ones are useful and which are not, and I will prioritize fixes and additions for anyone teaching with them.