Basel II changes risk management in banks strongly. Internal rating procedures would lead one to expect that banks are changing over to active risk control. But, if risk management is no longer a simple "game against nature", if all agents involved are active players then a shift from a...

In this short expository note I provide an overview of leveraged buy-out transactions (“LBOs”). I show in detail how an LBO transaction is structured and financed, as well as the typical return profile. I also provide a sample transaction accompanied by financial projections, debt repayment...

Over the last decade, randomized evaluations have taken the field of development economics by storm. Despite the availability of strong review pieces in the topic, there is no pedagogical paper on randomized evaluation. This paper bridges the gap by introducing three interactive classroom games...

This paper presents a simple inflation-targeting model with alternative assumptions regarding the conduct of monetary policy. The central bank is assumed to either follow a Taylor rule or minimize a social welfare loss function. The model can be tractably described by means of a straightforward...

Over the last four decades since Baumol's 1968 critique, there has been some progress in incorporating entrepreneurship into principles of economics texts. However, the critical roles of entrepreneurs in creating, operating, and destroying markets are generally either absent or relegated to...

Many popular macroeconomics textbooks have recently adopted the dynamic aggregate demand – aggregate supply framework to analyze business cycle fluctuations and the effects of monetary policy. This brings the textbook treatment much closer to the research frontier, although one major...

The paper presents a classroom experiment designed to improve undergraduate students' understanding of how banks create money. This concept is important to Macroeconomics and Money and Banking courses, yet students frequently struggle with it, largely due to the non-physical nature of deposits...

The Cobb Douglas production function is a central element in economic growth theory and Microeconomics. Its popularity in economics stems from certain convenient mathematical properties. Some of these properties describe a set of (partial) differential equations. Although the Cobb Douglas...