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…

What is the best way to allocate students to small teams in those economics courses that rely on small group work to enhance individual student learning? While experts in collaborative learning provide many suggestions, little empirical work has been done. This article begins to fill the gap. It examines whether a variety of characteristics of the…

Student dissatisfaction with teaching of economics--particularly with macroeconomics--during the current financial crisis mirrors dissatisfaction that was expressed during the last big crisis, the Great Depression. Then and now, a good number of students have felt that their lectures bear little relation to the economic crisis raging outside the…

Before 1980, strong demand existed in Australia for the economics degree. Since then, competition from programs in business and management has increased. Student preferences have shifted from university and secondary economics. Economics enrollments have declined in both sectors. The authors analyze these trends and assess economic education…

Using undergraduate student records from six large public universities from 1990 to 2003, the authors analyze the characteristics and performance of students by major in two economics courses: Principles of Microeconomics and Intermediate Microeconomics. This article documents important differences across students by major in the principles course…

Politics and economics interact. As a consequence, political science textbooks must often relate to the economic dimension--implicitly or explicitly. But we know very little about how these textbooks relate to economics. Are they merely unreflective customers of neoclassical economics or do they strive for a cross-disciplinary approach? An…

This article focuses on Turkey's experience of the Bologna Process. Its main objective is to contribute to the literature on the impact of Bologna Process on national higher education systems regarding the issue of curricula development. It argues that the Bologna Process has fostered development of transparent and systematic curricula, which…

The author presents a simple geometric method to graphically illustrate the expected utility from a gamble with more than two possible outcomes. This geometric result gives economics students a simple visual aid for studying expected utility theory and enables them to analyze a richer set of decision problems under uncertainty compared to what…

Learning Curves has its roots in economics and behavioral psychology. Learning Curves theory has several business applications and is widely used in the industry. As faculty of Operations Management courses, we cover this topic in some depth in the classroom. In this paper, we present some of our teaching methods and material that have helped us…

Central banking in the United States has a long and controversial history dating back to the earliest days of the republic. One of the most widely presented arguments against a central bank has been that the U.S. Constitution does not expressly grant the federal government power to charter a bank. Recently, this issue has received new scrutiny in…

South African society is characterized by high levels of poverty and unemployment. South Africa has an embarrassingly uneven distribution of income as reflected by the Gini-coefficient. While much of the country's economic ailments can be attributed to poor and selective application of economic policies during the apartheid era, there is a growing…

A survey of recent economics PhDs who graduated from U.S. PhD programs and are now teaching in either the United States or Canada revealed that only half of the respondents who taught a stand-alone course during their doctoral program had any teacher preparation training. Those who did have training only felt "adequately" prepared for…

The purpose of this study is to analyze the relationship between the grade performance of 128 students in an introductory micro-economics course and the average number of hours per week these students report spending on the Internet. The literature review offers a "priori" arguments supporting both positive and negative relationships.…

Today's economics and business students are expected to be our future business people and potentially the economic leaders and politicians of tomorrow. Thus, their beliefs and practices are liable to affect the definition of acceptable economics and business ethics. The empirical evaluation of the phenomenon of cheating in academia has almost…

This article describes results of an online survey conducted by the eXtension Financial Security for All (FSA) Community of Practice (CoP) to determine the social media capacity and activity of its members. The survey was conducted to inform two subsequent FSA CoP programs: an archived webinar on social media programs and impact evaluation methods…