The authors of this article implement a quasi-experimental strategy to estimate peer effects in economic education by exploiting the institutional setting in a large public university in China, where roommates are randomly assigned conditional on a student's major and province of origin. They found significant impacts of peer academic quality,…

This paper presents the first experimental evidence on the effects of live versus internet media of instruction. Students in a large introductory microeconomics course at a major research university were randomly assigned to live lectures versus watching these same lectures in an internet setting, where all other factors (e.g., instruction,…

This study aims to further our understanding of metalearning activity through the analysis of qualitative data gathered from 370 first-year microeconomics students in three UK universities. The students were asked to produce undirected reflective essays in response to a personal "learning profile" generated before, and after, the…

Classroom experiments in economics continue to increase in popularity. While early experiments were often hand-run in class, now computerized online experiments are also widely available. Using a quasiexperimental approach, the authors investigated whether any difference in student achievement (as measured by course scores and the "Test of…

Environmental markets have several institutional features that provide a new context for the use of auctions and that have not been studied previously. This paper reports on laboratory experiments testing three auction forms--uniform and discriminatory price sealed-bid auctions and an ascending clock auction. We test the ability of subjects to…

Through the use of event-history techniques, we will show that a duration framework is adapted to the analysis of higher education attrition. Our dropout model allows for estimates to vary over time. While some factors exhibit constant effects, like high school characteristics, other effects do vary from the first year to the fourth. Men and women…

In the first chapter, I measure the impact of student loan debt on young, college-educated workers' decisions regarding labor supply and enrollment in graduate school. I exploit variation in student loan debt driven by the formulas that determine Federal Student Aid in order to identify these effects. Instrumental variable estimates indicate…

In world regions receiving direct foreign aid, beneficiaries of aid often lack the education required to remove themselves from poverty. Micro-lending refers to the initiation of small loans to the neediest of borrowers who are unable to secure traditional financing from financial intermediaries. In order for micro-lending to thrive as a viable…

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…

Each chapter of this dissertation studies a different question within the field of Applied Microeconomics. The first chapter examines the mid- and long-term effects of the 1998 Asian Crisis on the educational attainment of Indonesian children ages 6 to 18, at the time of the crisis. The effects are identified as deviations from a linear trend for…

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…

The authors examined the role of problem sets on student learning in university microeconomics. A total of 126 students participated in the study in consecutive years. independent samples t test showed that students who were not given answer keys outperformed students who were given answer keys. Multiple regression analysis showed that, along with…

Undergraduate students are often interested in and benefit greatly from applications of economic principles. Historical novels drawn from real-world situations can engage students with economic concepts in new ways and provide a useful tool to help enhance instruction. In this article, the authors discuss the use of historical novels generally in…

The two forms of natural monopoly regulation that are typically discussed in intermediate microeconomics textbooks are marginal cost pricing and average cost pricing (rate-of-return regulation). However, within the last 20 years, price-cap regulation has largely replaced rate-of-return regulation because of the former's potential to generate more…

The existence of an inverse relationship between wage levels and regional unemployment rates, commonly referred to as the wage curve, is well established in the economic literature and was described by Card (1995) as being "close to an empirical law of economics". This microeconomic wage-unemployment relationship, first identified by…