Since the early 1970s, there has been a dramatic change in the way firms handle reference requests. Before 1970, firms would willingly provide detailed information about a former employee's job performance. More recently , firms have become reluctant to provide information due to a perceived...

The measurement of economic and social development is one of the most hotly contested subjects in economics. Since the 1970s, it has become evident that it is necessary to use a composite index to capture various aspects of social and human development and to address related issues of...

It is shown that the component statistics of the HDI are highly correlated with one another. An implication of this correlation is that a wide range of index weights produce indexes that are statistically identical to the HDI. Indexes with only two of the three HDI components are very highly...

This paper presents a framework for thinking abaout the different types of spreadsheet modeling applications available for teaching economics. Spreadsheet applications are categorized by the degree to which students are involved in the spreadsheet's construction, and the degree to which students...

Preliminary tests are conducted on the Cahill and Isely (1998) model. In this model, the level of external debt is partially determined by foreign aid. Specifically, this model suggests that the level of external debt for an LDC is positively related to GDP and aid, but is negatively related to...

This paper has a dual purpose. At the technical level, it updates the work of Gitanjali Joglekar and Andrew Zimbalist (1989) on the use of factor analysis to estimate per capita Gross Domestic Product (GDP) for Cuba. At the analytical level, it questions the validity of this approach when the...

The United Nations Development Programme's Human Development Index (HDI) has become a standard international measure of development. However, it has been criticized on several grounds. This paper investigates how robust the HDI is to changing two contentious aspects: the component statistics and...

This paper presents examples of consumer theory concepts that can be explored more thoroughly, and made more accessible, when spreadsheet software is used as part of the intermediate-level economics classroom. Areas of application are utility functions, income and substitution effects, price...

Because modern macroeconomics is by nature dynamic, the mathematics involved are often difficult for undergraduate students to grasp. Unfortunately, numerical examples that are helpful in clarifying other technical areas of economics are very time consuming and even intractable when using pen,...

This study introduces two new uses for the development index concept by making use of a variant of the well-known Human Development Index (HDI). Specifically, a modified HDI is estimated using the principal components method of factor analysis. The results will be used to investigate differences...