From Tradition to Theory: Teaching Economics Through Experience The Lucky Money Economics Project

Abstract Book of the 11th International Conference on New Trends in Teaching and Education

Year: 2026

[PDF]

From Tradition to Theory: Teaching Economics Through Experience The Lucky Money Economics Project

Prof. Dr. Daniel Barkley, Hoàng Minh Anh Khôi

ABSTRACT:

This study presents the Lucky Money Economics Project, an experiential learning initiative that transforms Vietnam’s Tết tradition of giving lucky money, or lì xì, into a culturally relevant economics laboratory. The project was designed to help undergraduate students connect abstract concepts, the Permanent Income Hypothesis, marginal propensity to consume, liquidity constraints, consumption smoothing, and mental accounting, to financial decisions drawn from their own lived experience.

A survey was completed by 179 students enrolled across six economics course sections at VinUniversity. Students reported how they allocated lucky money among personal consumption, savings, family contributions, and spending on others. They also answered questions measuring expected future income, income certainty, liquidity, financial tightness, counterfactual spending behavior, and mental accounting. The anonymized data were subsequently used to introduce survey design, descriptive statistics, dummy-variable construction, interaction effects, regression analysis, hypothesis testing, and evidence-based interpretation.

The findings provide evidence consistent with consumption smoothing: students with higher expected future income and greater income certainty spent a smaller share of lucky money on themselves. Mental accounting and gender also modified these relationships, illustrating how behavioral factors can complicate standard economic predictions. The project was later extended through a Shark Tank business proposal assignment to explore whether similar behavioral patterns appear in entrepreneurial risk planning.

The project demonstrates how culturally familiar practices, student-generated data, digital tools, and AI-assisted analysis can support interdisciplinary, inquiry-based learning. It offers a transferable model for transforming students from recipients of economic theory into active producers of economic knowledge.

Keywords: Experiential Learning; Economics Education; Behavioral Economics; Student-Generated Data; Culturally Responsive Teaching