Founder and director of the CORE project Wendy Carlin has been appointed as Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) in the 2026 New Year Honours. Wendy’s commitment to improving the quality and accessibility of economics education was recognised, with specific mention of the success of the CORE project and its open source, zero cost approach. Read more on the gov.uk website.
In a recent Substack post, Leighton Chipperfield, Chief Executive of the Royal Economic Society, celebrates a 5.5% increase in uptake of economics A level courses in the UK. This makes economics the eights most popular A level choice in England, and tenth in the UK.
Leighton partly attributes this increase to CORE’s efforts modernising university economics teaching. His post specifically cites CORE’s focus on making economics teaching more relevant. Visit Leighton’s Substack to read the full post.
Tamoghna Halder, Assistant Professor at Azim Premji University and a friend of UCL’s Stone Centre, is developing an AI‑powered learning support tool for economics undergraduates using CORE’s The Economy as his base text.
Motivated by India’s caste‑based inequalities—especially disparities in English fluency and academic confidence—Tamo set out to develop a tool which prompts students as they encounter errors in coding or unfamiliar vocabulary.
Tamo praised CORE for its role in the development of his AI tool. “CORE’s The Economy is connected to a wide network of students and universities around the world, in many different contexts… it offers really a nice variation in different ways for the tool to be used across these contexts. This helps me get better feedback… I find that CORE’s The Economy is less ideologically biased than most introductory textbooks, so I cannot really think of a better base text”.
Head over to the Stone Centre website to read a full interview with Tamo, where he discusses the idea behind his project and the issues it addresses.
A new research paper, ChatGPT as Economics Tutor: Capabilities and Limitations, from the University of Bristol has used CORE’s The Economy 1.0 as a reference text. The paper’s aim is to assess the ability of ChatGPT to explain economic concepts and answer multiple-choice questions.
The paper, authored by Natalie Bröse, Christian Spielmann, and Christian Tode, found that newer GPT models generate very accurate responses, but some inaccuracies persist. CORE’s The Economy 1.0 was used as reference material to determine the accuracy of GPT-3.5, GPT-4o, and o1preview model’s responses to the book’s definitions and solutions. The paper explains the decision to use CORE’s text on page 6 and how this choice impacts results on page 28. It is argued that ChatGPT can serve as an effective automated tutor for basic, knowledge-based questions—supporting students while posing a relatively low risk of misinformation.
Read the full paper ChatGPT as Economics Tutor: Capabilities and Limitations on the University of Bristol website.
We’re proud to see the CORE Econ project mentioned by Harvard University Professor Danielle Allen in an article for The Atlantic: America and its universities need a new social contract. Danielle commended our efforts to make the teaching of economics more relevant to present day economic realities and the concerns of students:
“An example of a valuable initiative is University College London’s CORE Econ project. The team there, working with a network of economists around the globe, has dramatically refashioned economics education to start from the problems that students say they want to solve.”
Danielle argues that American higher education is too focused on science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Instead, more should be invested in civic education and societal engagement.
The article is a thought-provoking read. Head over to The Atlantic to see it in full.
