Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to analyze critically the most important methods that are used in the evaluation of human resource development (HRD). Design/methodology/approach: The approach is to ask two questions: What are the methods available to define the impact of HRD in the economy? How can we evaluate the evaluations that have been…

How do students enrolled in online courses perform relative to those who choose a more traditional classroom environment? What student characteristics help explain differences in student academic achievement in the two modes of instruction? What factors affect the students' choice of instruction mode? The authors address these questions in…

Microeconomic principles courses focus on perfectly competitive markets far more than other market structures. The authors examine five possible reasons for this but find none of them sufficiently compelling. They conclude that textbook authors should place more emphasis on how economists select appropriate models and test models' predictions…

The authors describe an in-class exercise in which students participate in an auction to buy US Airways. The exercise is based on events of late 1995, in which neither United nor American Airlines decided to bid for US Airways. Two teams of students participate in an English auction. Students learn that the equilibrium of the sequential game is…

My dissertation research concentrates on the causes, motivations, and results of electricity restructuring, and research on the effectiveness of economic teaching and retention. The first chapter looks at motivations for electricity restructuring in the United States in terms of the Interest Group and Public Interest setting. The second chapter…

Love it or hate it, assessment has become the new reality on college and university campuses. Although measuring student achievement of course outcomes is not an easy task, assessment does not need to be a complex or painful experience. This paper describes the methods used to assess student achievement of the stated course outcomes in…

This article focuses on the erosion of the monopoly by universities of the higher education system in Israel. The hegemony of the universities, the major player in the academic field, has been shattered by the development of the regional colleges that unsettled the preconceptions concerning the higher education system in Israel, including the…

In order to consider whether a course in college algebra should be a prerequisite for taking psychology statistics, we recorded students' grades in elementary psychology statistics and in college algebra at a 4-year university. Students who earned credit in algebra prior to enrolling in statistics for the first time had a significantly higher mean…

Authors of intermediate microeconomics textbooks devote relatively more space to imperfectly competitive markets than can be justified by their relative occurrence in actual markets. This gap has persisted for at least 40 years, even with an almost complete turnover of authors between the decades of the 1960s and the 2000s. This portrayal gives…

Scope and Method of Study: This study develops, implements, and evaluates a new economics teaching pedagogy based on the U.S. Army's systems approach to training model. Using the approach, tasks are identified that compose the task domain for the Principles of Microeconomics course. From the 130 identified tasks, 73 are used by Economics of…

There have been few studies comparing student performance in online and face-to-face economics courses. Those studies that have been undertaken have concentrated on traditional students (18- to 22-year-olds). This paper examines student outcomes in an undergraduate course in microeconomics taught to non-traditional students (average age is 33…

An in-class game can be used to improve students' understanding of how a tradable discharge permit (TDP) program might work. There are, however, trade-offs one must face in designing such a game. An exercise might, in theory, demonstrate all the nuances of a TDP program and yet be so complex that students learn little from the experience. The…

The author shows how instructors might successfully introduce students in principles and intermediate microeconomic theory classes to the topic of bundling (i.e., the selling of two or more goods as a package, rather than separately). It is surprising how much students can learn using only the tools of high school geometry. To be specific, one can…

Third-degree price discrimination is taught in almost every intermediate microeconomics class. The theory, geometry, and the algebra behind the concept are simple, and the phenomenon is commonly associated with the sale of many of the goods and services used frequently by students. Classroom discussion is usually vibrant as students can relate…

Empirical analyses of sex differences in the career consequences of family migration have focused on adjudicating between the human capital and the gender-role explanations but have ignored the potential influence of gender inequality in the structure of the labor market. In this paper we estimate conditional difference-in-difference models with…