In the early 1940s, Black artist Jacob Lawrence painted a series of 60 panels that are now collectively called "The Migration Series." The panels tell the story of how Black Americans migrated from the South to the North, beginning with World War I. The panels provide an uncommon example of the intersection of economics, Black American…

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…

Economics faculty expect that students have an integrated understanding of economic theory upon graduation and that they grasp and appreciate how all elements of markets naturally move to equilibrium. Through assessment activities, the authors discovered that their students were not developing that knowledge, so they turned to learning theory to…

In this article, the authors explore consensus among economists on specific propositions based on a fall 2011 survey of American Economic Association members. Results are based on 568 responses and provide evidence of changes in opinion over time by including propositions from earlier studies in 2000 (Fuller and Geide-Stevenson 2003) and 1992…

Adam Smith's moral philosophy can be used to introduce economics students to the important idea of transactions costs. The author provides a brief background in this article to Smith's moral philosophy and connects it to the costs of transacting in a way that fits easily into the standard principles of microeconomics classroom. By doing…

The authors present suggestions by graduate students from a range of economics departments for improving the first-year core sequence in economics. The students identified a number of elements that should be added to the core: more training in building microeconomic models, a discussion of the methodological foundations of model-building, more…

The authors describe the theoretical preparation provided to students in advance of a limited-duration experiential learning experience in Washington DC in a Master's level course for students in Business or Public Administration. The students consider theoretical perspectives from economics, political science, and public administration with…

The assessment of university students' economic knowledge has become an increasingly important research area within and across countries. Particularly, the different influences of prior education, native language, and gender as some of the main prerequisites on students' economic knowledge have been highlighted since long. However, the findings…

Undergraduate economics lags behind cutting-edge economic theory. The author briefly reviews six related advances that profoundly extend and deepen economic analysis: game-theoretic modeling, collective-action problems, information economics and contracting, social preference theory, conceptualizing rationality, and institutional theory. He offers…

I study three separate questions in this dissertation. In Chapter 1, I develop and estimate a structural dynamic model of occupation and job choice to test hypotheses of the importance of wages and non-wages and learning in occupational transitions, and find that wages are approximately 3 times as important as non-wage benefits in decisions and…

This paper uses a relatively large dataset of the stated academic major preferences of economics majors at a relatively large, not highly selective, public university in the USA to identify the "discouraged-business-majors" (DBMs). The DBM hypothesis addresses the phenomenon where students who are screened out of the business curriculum often…

Does investing taxpayer money in higher education lead to major payoffs in economic growth? State legislators and policy makers say yes. They routinely advocate massive appropriations for university education and research, even in poor economic times, on the grounds that taxpayers will be rewarded many times over. The investment of federal funds…

The authors detail an urban economics experiment that is easily run in the classroom. The experiment has a flexible design that allows the instructor to explore how congestion, zoning, public transportation, and taxation levels determine the bid-rent function. Heterogeneous agents in the experiment compete for land use using a simple auction…

Previous studies have focused on how well students are learning economics, how teachers are trained, and other outcomes associated with improved understanding of economics. However, almost nothing is reported in the research literature on economics teachers' views of the curriculum, how they teach their subject, their views on public issues, and…

In 1989, microeconomics and macroeconomics examinations debuted on the Advanced Placement (AP) scene. At that time, many professors of economics were skeptical that college freshmen had the skills and maturity to understand the concepts in principles of economics courses. They thought teaching these concepts to high school students was even more…