Taxation has several significant excess burdens, including enforcement costs, compliance costs, and deadweight losses. Most estimates find that raising a dollar of tax revenue costs much more than a dollar. Unfortunately, commonly used public finance textbooks do not integrate these costs into...

This brief note provides a simple, yet powerful example of how the marginal cost/marginal benefit principle can be used in everyday life. Using the decision of the optimal choice of speed on the highway, this note was developed for use as one of the first readings in an introductory...

This study investigates the effect of the “Keys to Financial Success” high school personal finance curriculum on student achievement. It relies on multiple years of pre- and posttest data from 1,701 students who took a “Keys” course and from a comparison group of 261 students from the...

While there was no abstract for this brief paper, it clarifies for students that demand and supply slopes convey the burden of taxation discussion at least as well as does the more typical discussion employing elasticities.

The author describes his experience with the process of peer reviews by economists of economics departments. On the bases of roughly 20 reviews of departments in the public and private sectors over two decades, he discusses how the process works and what can be accomplished by it and identifies...

The authors provide an overview of papers presented at The Scholarship of Teaching Economics conference that was held at The University of Melbourne in July 2000. The objective of the conference was to bring attention to research being conducted in economic education at the tertiary level and to...

In answer to the long-standing question, what kinds of knowledge and skills should economics majors master, Lee Hansen has advocated a proficiencies approach. According to this approach, the teaching and learning of economics undergraduates should be based on the attainment of (six) specified...

America's adult population is economically illiterate. College economics instruction must shoulder some of the blame for this situation. Forty percent of all college graduates take an economics course. Over 95 percent of principles of economics students do not continue on to major in economics,...

The authors demonstrate that personality type is an important explanatory variable in student performance in economics courses at the upper level, just as it was at the principles level. Similar to the results for principles students, they find that introverted students make better grades in...

We believe that economists have much to learn from educational research practices and related pedagogical innovations in other disciplines, in particular physics education. In this paper we identify three key features of physics education research that distinguish it from economics education...