The authors demonstrate that most textbooks are ambiguous at best in their treatment of cross-price and income elasticity of demand. There is also no discussion of what initiates a price increase in discussions of substitutes and complements in the textbooks examined. The authors offer a remedy...

The “surprise value” of many economic observations makes our discipline quite interesting for many students. One such anomaly is that providing “free” education in an effort to reduce the number of drop-outs can often result in a smaller amount of education purchased. This result is very...

This paper discusses the use of hedonic techniques to theoretically and empirically understand the wages of higher education faculty. The paper first presents theoretical models of department and faculty choice. These models represent a synthesis of prior work in the hedonic area. The models...

We show in this paper that efficiency requires that fines be used to the maximum extent possible relative to increased enforcement. While there is a political limit to how far this process should be pushed, in times of budget stress there could be justification for increased reliance on fines...

We show here that the usual textbook declaration that there is no such thing as a "supply curve" for a monopoly can be confusing for students and is at least somewhat misleading. The perfect competition case corresponds to a "one-parameter" demand curve facing the firm; varying that parameter...

We describe how to usefully incorporate inventory holding behavior into supply and demand as usually presented in undergraduate economics courses. The approach taken adds considerable realism that will appeal to certain students of economics

The standard textbook description of relationship between the LRMC and the SRMC for output levels below the optimum for a particular plant size is typically misleading and imprecise. Students are frequently confused as to how the SRMC can ever be below the LRMC since everything is variable in...

The burden of taxation is usually discussed in terms of elasticity of demand and supply. We show here that, at least for many students, merely using the slopes of demand and supply to yield the same conclusions will be more intuitively satisfying

We show here that the return to education and several other concerns in the labor earnings literature are substantially impacted by amenity variation. Moreover, the nature of the impacts are in some cases counter-intuitive. For example, if higher education households move to nicer amenity...

If labor is fairly mobile, as it is in the United States, one would expect that households would move from less desirable areas toward more desirable areas until all areas are equally desirable. The way that areas become equally desirable is through tthe impact of movers on wages and rents (and...