This article introduces macroprudential policy using a static New Keynesian Macroeconomics model with financial frictions. The authors analyze two related questions: First, they show how the procyclicality of financial factors, captured by the financial accelerator, amplifies the transmission of supply and demand shocks and impacts the intuition…

In this article, the authors are the first to describe the core economics curriculum requirements for economics majors at all American colleges and universities, as opposed to a sample of institutions. Not surprisingly, principles of economics is nearly universally required and implemented as a two-semester course in 85 percent of economics major…

Using 1994-95, 2002-3, and 2008-9 data, the author found that economics majors scored well on the LSAT® (1998, 2006, 2010). These results are often posted on university economics (and other) department Web sites. The author, who updates the prior studies using current data for law school applicants for the 2012-13 class of students entering law…

In this article, the author considers the merits of two classes of profit maximization problems: those involving perfectly competitive firms with quadratic and cubic cost functions. While relatively easy to develop and solve, problems based on quadratic cost functions are too simple to address a number of important issues, such as the use of…

The authors describe their experience with integrating a semester-long economic analysis project into an intermediate macroeconomic theory course. Students work in teams of "economic advisors" to write a series of nested reports that analyze the current state of the economy, and propose and evaluate policies for a decision-maker. The…

In this article, the author presents a way of using in-class debates to discuss contentious issues and help students develop critical thinking skills. Three elements were incorporated into an undergraduate public finance course: a presentation of ethical approaches in order to formally discuss normative issues, class debates which required…

Over the last few years, classroom response systems (or "clickers") have become increasingly common. Although most systems require students to use a standalone handheld device, bring-your-own-device (BYOD) systems allow students to use devices they already own (e.g., a cell phone, tablet or laptop) to submit responses via text message or…

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…

Economics has been shown to be a relatively high-earning college major, but geographic differences in earnings have been largely overlooked. The authors of this article use the American Community Survey to examine geographic differences in both absolute earnings and relative earnings for economics majors. They find that there are substantial…

The 2007-10 growth spurt (18 percent over three years) in U.S. undergraduate economics degrees stalled out in 2011. Degrees awarded have been relatively constant over the past three years.

In this article, the authors investigate competitive firm behaviors in a two-firm environment assuming linear cost and demand functions. By introducing conjectural variations, they capture the different market structures as specific configurations of a more general model. Conjectural variations are based on the assumption that each firm believes…

Since the financial meltdown of 2007, advanced macroeconomic theory has delved more deeply into the question of the appropriate fiscal policy when the nominal interest rate is close to or at zero percent. Such analysis is typically conducted with the aid of New Keynesian Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium models. The policy implications are,…

Education officials often use one assessment system both to create measures of student achievement and to create performance metrics for educators. However, modern standardized testing systems are not designed to produce performance metrics for teachers or principals. They are designed to produce reliable measures of individual student achievement…

The 2007-10 growth spurt (18 percent over three years) in U.S. undergraduate economics degrees came to an abrupt end in 2011 and 2012. Degrees awarded grew less than one percent over the past two years.

The authors evaluated principles of macroeconomics textbooks for readability using Coh-Metrix, a computational linguistics tool. Additionally, they conducted an experiment on Amazon's Mechanical Turk Web site in which participants ranked the readability of text samples. There was a wide range of scores on readability indexes both among…