This dissertation investigates some of the ways efficiency wages are important to both the U.S. economy and research in economics. The first section develops a model to investigate the likely effects of the decline of references in the United States. Survey data and anecdotal evidence makes it...

This paper presents a way to incorporate the neoclassical assumptions of the permanent income hypothesis and rational expectations into a spreadsheet version of a textbook new Keynesian model. This approach allows students to compare these schools of thought through many different types of...

This paper presents some Excel-based exercises that allow students to estimate some key macroeconomic relationships: Okun's Law and the Taylor rule. The Okun's law exercise has the additional benefit of providing estimates for long-run GDP growth. The Taylor rule exercises give students the...