The author provides an economic analysis of tradable pollution permits by clarifying the derivation of permit supply and demand relationships and connecting those concepts to permit trading for the case of two polluters. Using the standard comparison of costs and benefits, he makes the marginal...

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...

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 determination of college students' academic performance is an important issue in higher education. Whether students' attendance at lectures affects students' exam performance has received considerable attention. The authors conduct a randomized experiment to study the average attendance...

The author presents new evidence on the effects of attendance on academic performance. He used a large panel data set for introductory microeconomics students to explicitly take into account the effect of unobservable factors correlated with attendance, such as ability, effort, and motivation....

Much of the economic education literature suggests that the principles of economics class size does not significantly affect student performance. However, study methods have varied in terms of the aggregation level (student or class), the measure of performance (TUCE or course letter grade), and...

Although academic ability is the most important explanatory variable in studies of student learning, researchers control for it with a wide array and combinations of proxies. The authors investigated how the proxy choice affects estimates of undergraduate student learning by testing over 150...

Individual semester-by-semester undergraduate grade point average for each of the eight semesters of the collegiate academic life cycle for five entire student cohorts for the classes of 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, and 2002 at a large, private university in the northeast (N = 12,663) reveal a...

What is the effect of small-group learning on student learning outcomes in economic instruction? In spring 2002 and fall 2004, the author applied cooperative learning to one section of intermediate macroeconomics and taught another section using a traditional lecture format. He identified and...