An obstacle to the teaching of principal-agent theory is the technical complexity and intractability of the general model. Even in academic studies strong assumptions are often imposed so as to derive an analytical solution. The author describes a graphical approach to the standard...

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 proposes an alternative to the traditional definition of the gains from international trade and, hence, an alternative defense of free trade. Rather than showing that free trade allows a country to consume more of all final goods, the author’s approach shows that free trade...

The gap between men’s and women’s choice of college majors has not changed over the past two decades. One aspect of the debate surrounding their choice is the presence or absence of women and minority faculty role models who could attract female and minority students to a...

Many introductory microeconomics textbook authors derive the law of demand from the assumption of diminishing marginal utility. Authors of intermediate and graduate textbooks derive demand from diminishing marginal rate of substitution and ordinal preferences. These approaches are not...

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 authors measure math skills with a broader set of explanatory variables than have been used in previous studies. To identify what math skills are important for student success in introductory microeconomics, they examine (1) the student’s score on the mathematics portion of the ACT...

The relationship between expected grades and student evaluations of teaching (SET) has been controversial. The authors take another look at the controversy by employing class-specific observations and controlling for time-invariant instructor and course differences with a fixed-effects model....

Generative learning provides students with opportunities to organize course content, integrate new content with students’ current knowledge, and elaborate on course content by making connections to real-world events. These opportunities promote less reliance on professors’ lectures...

Third-degree price discrimination is taught in almost every intermediate microeconomics class. The theory, geometry, and the algebra behind the concept are simple, and the phenomenon is commonly associated with the sale of many of the goods and services used frequently by students. Classroom...