Economists often introduce their classes to opportunity cost concepts by pointing out the additional incomes students could be earning were they employed full time rather than attending university. A potential additional cost, a reduction in years of future labor force participation, is unlikely...

We describe the use of a serious game in intermediate macroeconomics: Mankiw’s Presidential Game. Students in the classroom are assigned different roles as monetary and fiscal policy makers, while the online game is used to estimate the impact of their decisions. After the game, the instructor...

The number of undergraduate-level textbooks on environmental economics has increased in recent years, but the textbook treatment of optimal emissions (abatement) varies markedly from textbook to textbook. In particular, there is no consensus as to whether to model the economic “bad” (i.e....

In this paper, the distinction between nominal and real income is highlighted by positing the existence of an imaginary “real dollar store.” In this store, all items are sold at a price of one dollar in the base year and the price of each is indexed to the cost of living. Hence, such...

The purpose of this paper is to describe two different pedagogical experiments employed in a course on global capitalism. First, the course incorporated interdisciplinary team teaching (an economist and a political scientist). Second, the course created a team project, which allowed the students...

By evaluating a new data set on colleges and universities across six states, this paper characterizes the state of the economics major and identifies institutional characteristics that may influence key features of an economics major. Although majors are similar in terms of credit hour...

Appropriate assessment is of major importance for universities today. Many faculty perceive assessment as already occurring through grade assignment. This paper investigates grades versus knowledge of learning objectives as forms of assessment. By analyzing the relationship between examination...

The graphical analysis of the income and substitution effects is an important part of consumer theory that is commonly taught at the level of intermediate microeconomics. Few textbooks, however, devote much discussion of these effects for perfect substitutes. The purpose of this paper is to fill...

This paper uses historical data from the United States to investigate the simple Keynesian consumption-income relationship. When structural breaks are taken into account, the theory of the simple Keynesian consumption function performs quite well in describing what is seen in the US data....

This pedagogical method to estimate the unemployment rate is appropriate for an undergraduate course in macroeconomics. Class instructors can use the experiment to make many macroeconomic principles readily apparent to the unskilled reader. This experiment examines the dynamics of calculating...