Introductory economics courses emphasize opportunity cost, comparative advantage and specialization to show the benefits of trade. We assert that this emphasize leads to erroneous student mindset that trade requires specialization based on comparative advantage. We test students who have been...

Undergraduate students typically are able to regurgitate basic rules and formulas for probability. They also have little trouble following the cookbook steps for estimation and hypothesis testing. Microsoft Excel has empowered them to run regressions. We are not persuaded, however, that these...