This paper aims at estimating the determinants of co-authorship in economics. More specifically, we test if there is a relationship between the efficiency in research of an individual and that of his co-authors using a novel database of French academics. The main empirical result is that the...

The well-known study by Ferraro and Taylor (2005) on the understanding of opportunity cost has sparked considerable debate. This paper addresses one specific aspect of the question, namely the issue of units of measurement when converting goods to dollars for comparison purposes. Results...

Much of the insight economists would like to share with non-economists derives from two fundamental concepts: division of labor and intrinsic versus extrinsic incentives. As Plato's Republic offers concise treatment of both concepts, it provides an excellent complement to standard principles of...

This paper surveys the current state of teaching in international macroeconomics and finance. After collecting graduate international macroeconomics syllabi taught by international economists in the leading US economics departments between 2001 and 2005, I study whether there is consensus on...

The economy can be viewed as consisting of four sectors, the goods and services, labor, monetary, and international sectors, with overall equilibrium consisting of simultaneous equilibrium in each of these sectors. Interactions among these markets headaches for students. The “big picture” of...

This is a paper about the economics of the Battle of Lepando (Nafpaktos) in Greece during the year 1571, when the Western League entered into a decisive naval battle with the Ottomans. The western ships, with the help of Greeks, won this naval Battle. In this naval battle the Western League...

Scoring methods in multiple-choice tests are usually designed as fair bets, and thus random guesswork yields zero expected return. This causes the undesired result of forcing risk averse test-takers to pay a premium in the sense of letting unmarked answers for which they have partial but not...

In our experience, all textbook presentations of the Slutsky Equation under a discrete price change use a compensation scheme based on the compensating variation. Our students have sensed this convention is arbitrary in that they have asked, why consider this compensation scheme, and not one...

We carried out a survey among a large group of undergraduate students of different disciplines and different years to test whether the study of economics or scientific majors influences the degree by which people are affected by money illusion. We find significant differences between first-year...

A common phenomenon about transition economies is that the return to schooling improves as economic reform progresses. Existing research suggests that Vietnam is not an exception to this pattern. However, the rate of return in period from 1992 to 1998 is still relatively low, below 5 percent,...