The authors demonstrate that most textbooks are ambiguous at best in their treatment of cross-price and income elasticity of demand. There is also no discussion of what initiates a price increase in discussions of substitutes and complements in the textbooks examined. The authors offer a remedy...

The “surprise value” of many economic observations makes our discipline quite interesting for many students. One such anomaly is that providing “free” education in an effort to reduce the number of drop-outs can often result in a smaller amount of education purchased. This result is very...

We show in this paper that efficiency requires that fines be used to the maximum extent possible relative to increased enforcement. While there is a political limit to how far this process should be pushed, in times of budget stress there could be justification for increased reliance on fines...

The burden of taxation is usually discussed in terms of elasticity of demand and supply. We show here that, at least for many students, merely using the slopes of demand and supply to yield the same conclusions will be more intuitively satisfying

We show here that the return to education and several other concerns in the labor earnings literature are substantially impacted by amenity variation. Moreover, the nature of the impacts are in some cases counter-intuitive. For example, if higher education households move to nicer amenity...

If labor is fairly mobile, as it is in the United States, one would expect that households would move from less desirable areas toward more desirable areas until all areas are equally desirable. The way that areas become equally desirable is through tthe impact of movers on wages and rents (and...

The “surprise value” of many economic observations makes our discipline quite interesting for many students. One such anomaly is that providing “free” education in an effort to reduce the number of dropouts can often result in a lower level of educational quality purchased. This result...

The observations we makes are fairly simple, although many teachers of economics may be unfamiliar with them: 1) If the demand relationship is assumed to be "constant elasticity" (the double logarithm specification), a change in a demand-shifting variable (e.g. income) will result in a rotation...

The paper lacks an abstract but provides additional insights into why blacks remained in the South for so long following the Emancipation Proclamation leading to the abolition of slavery in the United States

In the 1970's, the percentage of high school graduates completing RN training increased with little change in the rate of return to training. During the 1980's this percentage declined, despite large increases in the rate of return. The national data employed here examine long-run trends (with...