The authors document the types of undergraduate colleges and universities attended by those who earned a doctorate in economics from an American university from 1966 through 2003. They examine relationships between type of undergraduate institution and attrition and time-to-degree in PhD...

The author reports on various aspects of teaching economics in an in- terdisciplinary, team-taught course, including reflections on a unique experiment in teaching economics to nonmajors. By the incorporation of selected topics of gender economics into the interdisciplinary course about the...

Using a large multi-school sample, the authors examined how the characteristics and attitudes of students interact with the pedagogy and attributes of the instructor to influence students’ decisions to study economics beyond the first semester. They found that students who have a...

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...

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...

The Solow model is widely regarded as the workhorse model of the theory of economic growth. Although at one point this model was first encountered in graduate school, it has since filtered down to the intermediate and, occasionally, to the principles of macroeconomics course. Many have commented...