Teaching students to use critical thinking skills is a popular goal of many economics courses. But what does "critical thinking" really mean, and how is it implemented? This article considers various interpretations of "critical thinking" and distinguishes "big-think" from "little-think" critical thinking,…

The field of econometrics largely started with time series analysis because many early datasets were time-series macroeconomic data. As the field developed, more cross-sectional and longitudinal datasets were collected, which today dominate the majority of academic empirical research. In nonacademic (private sector, central bank, and governmental)…

The author discusses the development of a unique course, The Economics of Online Dating. The course is an upper-level undergraduate course that combines intensive discussion, peer review, and economic theory to teach modeling skills to undergraduates. The course uses the framework of "online dating," interpreted broadly, as a point of…

A lack of consensus remains on what should form the theoretical core of the undergraduate intermediate macroeconomic course. In determining how to deal with the Keynesian/classical divide, instructors must decide whether to follow the modern approach of building macroeconomic relationships from micro foundations, or to use the traditional approach…

In this article, the authors use a large, recent, and accessible data set to examine the effect of economics major on individual earnings. They find a significant positive earnings gain for economics majors relative to other majors, and this advantage increases with the level of education. Their findings are consistent with Black, Sanders, and…

The University of California, Berkeley sends more undergraduate students to economics PhD programs than any other public university. While this fact is surely a function of its size, there may be lessons from the Berkeley experience that others could adopt. To investigate why Berkeley generates so many economics PhD students, the author convened…

The Edgeworth exchange diagram is a traditional tool of undergraduate microeconomic theory that depicts the mutually beneficial gains from voluntary trade. The authors take the analysis one step further. They identify the buyer's and seller's surpluses that accrue to both trading parties in the Edgeworth diagram. This is a straightforward exercise…

The author argues that the aggregate demand/aggregate supply (AD/AS) model is significantly improved--although certainly not perfected--by trimming it of the short-run aggregate supply (SRAS) curve. Problems with the SRAS curve are shown first for the AD/AS model that casts the AD curve as identifying the equilibrium level of output associated…

The author discusses several issues that instructors of introductory macroeconomics courses should consider when introducing imports in the Keynesian expenditure model. The analysis suggests that the specification of the import function should partially, if not completely, be the result of a simple discussion about the spending and import…

Post-conventional economic theories are assembled to inquire into the contingent, mimetic, symbolic, and material spirals unfolding the dot-com bubble, 1992-2002. The new technologies bubble is reconstructed as a rhetorical movement across the practices of the hybrid market-industry risk culture of communications. The legacies of the bubble task…

The authors show how the transformation loci in the specific factors model (capital specificity) and the Heckscher-Ohlin-Samuelson model (capital mobility) can be rigorously derived and easily compared by using geometric techniques on the basis of Savosnick geometry. The approach shows directly that the transformation locus with capital…

The author investigates how ability and gender affect grades on homework projects performed by assigned pairs of students in an undergraduate macroeconomics course. The assignment grade is found to depend on the ability of both students, and the relative importance of the stronger and weaker student differs in predictable ways depending on the…

The author analyzes the inflation-targeting model that underlies recent textbook expositions of the aggregate demand-aggregate supply approach used in introductory courses in macroeconomics. He shows how numerical simulations of a model with inflation inertia can be used as a tool to help students understand adjustments in response to demand and…

This paper uses a new data-set for cumulative national investment in formal schooling and a new instrument for schooling to estimate the national return on investment in 61 countries. These estimates are combined with data on the private rate of return on investment in schooling to estimate the external rate of return. In 1990 the external rate of…

The authors review the graphical approach to teaching the real business cycle model introduced in Barro. They then look at where this approach cuts corners and suggest refinements. Finally, they compare graphical and exact models by means of impulse-response functions. The graphical models yield reliable qualitative results. Sizable quantitative…