Suppose you are interested in the level of a state variable (e.g. a disease is present or absent or of a pre-specified level of severity, or a failure is recorded or not, etc.) and have a potentially useful but imperfect diagnostic test method, (e.g. a blood test result for this disease, or a...

This classroom experiment introduces students to the notion of credit risk by allowing them to trade on comparable corporate bond issues from two types of markets - investment-grade and high-yield. Investment-grade issues have a lower probability of default than high-yield issues, and thus...

Fifteen years of copy-editing experience – with theses (both in economics and in several medical fields), journal articles, book chapters and books, conference presentations, government reports, etc. – are distilled here. Papers are often sent to me for “language correction”, but what I...

Blogs provide a dynamic interactive medium for online discussion, consistent with communal constructivist pedagogy. This paper explores the use of blogs in the teaching and assessment of a small (40-60 students) introductory economics paper. The role of blogs as a teaching, learning and...

The results of three surveys of freshman economics students (2008-2010) at the Waikato Management School, New Zealand, suggest that incoming students have significant levels of prior economics knowledge. Given this head start in knowledge, we have expanded our freshman lecture material with more...