About

Economics of Parks and Recreation is the work of Jadrian Wooten from Virginia Tech University and Kalina Staub from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  The project is an independent endeavor and unassociated with our host institutions.

We started this project in order to add to the already beneficial resources available online that connect pop culture to economic concepts. Websites already exist for shows like The Big Bang Theory, Seinfeld, The Office, and Shark Tank, but we found that they were lacking in one key area: externalities, public choice, and comparative economic systems. This led us to create this site, to fill that void.

Since the final episode of Parks and Recreation aired in 2015, the goal of this site is to provide teaching resources and lesson plans to high school and college faculty. If you identify a clip that is not on the website, please contact us. If you plan to use clips from this site in a research paper, please cite our note that was published in The Journal of Economic Education:

Wooten, J.J. and Staub, K. (2019) Teaching economics using NBC’s Parks and Recreation, The Journal of Economic Education, 50(1), 87-88, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/00220485.2018.1551098.