This paper makes use of the wealth of materials left by Wisconsin Institutionalists to consider how they thought about economics as public science and as public persuasion. Considered is how the philosophy of pragmatism and an emphasis on empiricism manifested in economics practice at Wisconsin....

Technological interventions in and out of the classroom have been sold as a way to improve student understanding of economics for decades. Yet despite the panoply of ways to incorporate technology, it is not clear which types of interventions consistently result in statistically significant...

Under the authoritarian rule of Enver Hoxha, Albania pursued one of the more unusual variants of a planned economy, increasingly isolated from the rest of the socialist world. In this paper, we consider the interplay between the Hoxha's policy of economic isolationism and the economics produced...

The "Lake Wobegon Effect'' describes the potential bias introduced into survey-based analyses of education issues, because students systematically over-report academic achievements such as grade-point average. While the use of official-records data negates this effect, many researchers can only...

This paper examines the views of three prominent Wisconsin progressives – Richard T. Ely, Tomas Sewall Adams, and John R. Commons – on taxes as social policy. Wisconsin emerged as a national progressive leader in the 1890s – a ‘laboratory of democracy’ that produced the nation’s...

This year marks the sixtieth anniversary of the book that established the field of public choice – The Calculus of Consent by James M. Buchanan and Gordon Tullock. The year is also the thirtieth anniversary of Elinor Ostrom’s “Covenants With and Without a Sword,” in which she...

Leveraging a “quasi-experiment” where some of the faculty at a U.S. university unexpectedly saw their teaching loads increase, we test whether the steeper requirement affected student evaluations of teaching (SET). Using the university’s aggregated SET, we find the instructors assigned...