Economics is permeated with value judgements, and removing them would be neither possible nor desirable. They are consequential, in the sense that they have a sizeable impact on economists’ output. Yet many economists may not even realise they are there. This paper surveys ways in which values...

Breaking Bad is currently ranked fifth by the Internet Movie Database's (IMDB) Top 250 television shows based on user rankings and second among 100 shows reviewed by The Hollywood Reporter. Despise the series ending in 2013, Al-Bahrani et al. (2016) find that current students still rank the show...

Superstore follows a group of employees working at Cloud 9, a fictional big-box retailer in Missouri. The show also portrays an abundance of scenes that can be used to teach economics at the undergraduate level. We analyze four particular episodes that are rich in teaching content, but also...

Analogies can simplify complex new material by relating it to ideas students already know. Making cross-disciplinary connections also makes the material more engaging, accessible and memorable. In this study, we perform a controlled empirical test to examine whether providing cross-discipline...

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...

The effect of absenteeism on students’ exam performance during an introductory microeconomics course was examined. The focus was on the impact of absenteeism in the prior exam period on current exam performance. Results showed a negative and significant correlation – one additional class...

Writing should be an integral component of mathematics intensive economic courses. The economic teacher is faced with a dilemma. If he does not use mathematics and teaches economics informally relying mainly on words and diagrams, then the students will fail to understand most current economic...

The commonly used method for representing macroeconomics as a social system is by assuming the existence of a number of agencies (or entities) and of their various connecting links. In practice this is achieved and illustrated by the use of a block-and-flow diagram. For the case being considered...

In this study, it was found that economists were sensitive to different commodities based on their attitudes in terms of fairness toward the price mechanism, whereas non-economists did not exhibit significant sensitivity. This sensitivity was so strong that no self-selection effect could be...