The authors assess the impact of foreign graduate teaching associates (GTAs) on undergraduate economics instruction where the standard language for the majority of students is English. They find little evidence that foreign GTAs adversely affect grades in economics principles courses or...

Students are interested in lecture examples and class exercises involving data connected to the maiden voyage and the sinking of the liner Titanic. Information on the passengers and their fate can be used to explore relationships between various tests for differences in survival rates between...

The authors describe a classroom game used to teach students about the impact of reputations in markets with asymmetric information. The game is an extension of Holt and Sherman’s lemons market game and simulates a market under three information conditions. In the full information...

Dynamic models are increasingly used in economics, especially in macroeconomics. However, the skills required for constructing and analyzing dynamic models are advanced relative to those required for static models. Consequently, dynamic models are difficult to introduce into courses where the...

The author describes a classroom game demonstrating the process of adjustment to long-run equilibrium in a market consisting of price-taking firms. This game unites and extends key insights from several simpler games in a framework more consistent with the standard textbook model of a...

Unit-root testing strategies are unnecessarily complicated because they do not exploit prior knowledge of the growth status of the time series, they worry about unrealistic outcomes, and they double- or triple-test for unit roots. The authors provide a testing strategy that cuts through these...

The author describes two learning activities for teaching economics at the advanced undergraduate level: a May American Economic Review (AER) papers seminar and an analytic project. Both activities help students learn to “do economics.†The May AER papers seminar promotes in-depth...

Many studies have identified factors that contribute to success in economics principles courses, but few have examined the causes and effects of student drops and failure. The author follows 239 students through their economic principles course and tracks the students in the year after the...

Students often exhibit overconfident grade expectations and tend to overestimate the actual course grade at the completion of a course. Current theories of student motivation suggest such overconfidence may lead students to study less than if they had accurate grade perceptions. The authors...

In each period of a dynamic tax-rebate program, a (fixed) quantity tax is imposed on each unit of a given good, and the tax revenue is rebated back to the consumer in the next period. The program lasts for infinite number of periods. The author considers a representative consumer’s...