Enhancing the teaching of introductory economics with a team-based,multi-section competition

The authors describe a unique approach to enhancing student learning at the introductory economics level that utilizes a multi-section, team-based competition. The competition is structured to supplement learning throughout the entire introductory course. Student teams are presented with current economic issues, trends, or events, and use economic tools and theories to comprehensively examine the topics. Students present their analyses in their own sections with one team from each section moving on to compete in an inter-section round. Students are judged on technicality, creativity, and applicability of economic concepts. The competition has the potential to advance students' creativity, collaboration, communication, and critical and analytical thinking skills, while enhancing their ability to apply foundational economic concepts to real-world settings.     

Community college economics instruction: Results from a National Science Foundation Project

The principal investigator of a National Science Foundation project, “Economics at Community Colleges,” surveyed community college economics faculty and organized workshops, webinars, and regional meetings to address community college faculty isolation from new ideas in economics and economics instruction. Survey results, combined with National Study of Postsecondary Faculty data, help fill a lacuna in information about community college faculty. A key finding is the reliance in community college economic instruction on part-time faculty, including many who do not hold a graduate degree in economics. The project's webinars reached the most community college faculty, while the workshops were most effective in improving economics instruction. Areas for future research are identified.     

《农业经济学》课程教学方式的改进与实践

农业经济学是农业高校农林经济管理专业、农村区域发展等专业的本科专业基础课,在专业课程体系构造中具有十分重要的地位。结合所在教学团队多年来的实践和体会,从农业经济学课堂教学方式、实践教学方式及考试方式等方面提出改进的建议,以提高农业经济学课程的教学水平。     

The economics of research,consulting, and teaching quality: theory and evidence from a technical university

We investigate the effect of both research and consulting on teaching quality in higher education, at the individual level. We propose a theoretical model in which academics allocate effort between the three activities, over a two period time horizon, under the assumption of positive spillovers from research to both consulting opportunities and teaching, and of life-cycle effects on incentives. Propositions from the model are tested against data from a mid-sized Italian engineering faculty. We find that teaching quality is negatively related to consulting and positively related to research experience. However, both relationships are not linear, due to the importance of several mediating factors, such as seniority and the role of scientific publications as a signal for attracting consulting opportunities.     

Unemployment and the economics of gradualist policy reform

This paper investigates the efficiency of adjustment to economic reform programs when the cost of adjustment arises from high unemployment that can be generated as contracting sectors shrink faster than expanding sectors grow. Under plausible assumptions on the adjustment process, the speed of adjustment to “shock therapy” reforms is shown to be excessively rapid, and the rate of unemployment to be excessively high during the transition to the new equilibrium. The authorities can improve the efficiency of the adjustment by removing the distortion gradually, rather than abruptly. Gradualism has beneficial income distributional, as well as efficiency properties, because it improves welfare of the unemployed, who are necessarily the least advantaged social group in this model.     

The economics of information: An exposition

The study of information as a choice variable has been given much more weight by disciplines other than economics. This paper tries to lay out the essential economic characteristics of information as an economic commodity. It discusses the reasons why usual market analysis fails and some of the problems that information creates for industrial structure. It is the treatment of information as a variable and its implications for economic behavior that needs further analysis. This is done by giving a formal statement of the role of information in economic decisions based on the use of information and applying it to specific forms of payoff and cost functions. That in many cases information is about rates leads to the conclusion that the value of new technical information is related to the scale of operation. Once information has been obtained its transmission is easy. Therefore it is difficult to make information into property and the incentives to create it will be lacking. In general the analysis shows that the special properties of information as an economic good have strong implications for the very role and meaning of the firm.I want to acknowledge the support of a grant from the Sloan Foundation     

The political economics of complexity : From the information economy to the ‘complexity’ economy

The economics of information allows one to distinguish within the national product the real production from the costs of organization. It reveals a continuous inflation of these costs which, per employee and since 1900, has been twice as fast as the increase of productivity. From this, one can conclude that the growth of productivity comes up against a real ‘wall’ when the costs of organization approach 50% of the national product. This is the essential cause of the present crisis. The author subsequently designs an economy of organization structures applicable to complex systems, such as physical, biological or social systems. He shows how the 50% wall is characteristic for centralized structures. Most economic structures are those where social forces and solidarities are distributed justly among all levels of organization, from local to global ones. They tend to establish themselves by self-organization, but a new political economy applying these principles would, aided by information and communication technologies, accelerate this process.     

财经类高校实施通识教育若干问题探析

针对当前我国高等教育中普遍出现的重专业教育、轻通识教育的现象,并结合财经类高校的实际,探讨了在财经类高校推行通识教育的必要性和紧迫性。在此基础上,又分析了财经类高校实施通识教育所面临的困境,最后提出了在财经类高校语境下推进通识教育的若干建议。     

Students' persistent preconceptions and learning economic principles

Economic views held by the general public tend to differ significantly from those of economic experts. Would these differences fade away if people were exposed to some economic instruction? In this article, the authors identify college students' preconceptions about economic issues at the beginning of the semester, verify their persistence throughout the semester, and test whether their beliefs are correlated to course performance. The authors conduct a survey at the beginning and end of the semester on a sample of first-year students taking an economic principles course. They find evidence of preconception persistence and reasoning inconsistencies, pointing to some cognitive biases as a plausible cause. Most students do not integrate the newly learned tools into their thinking process, even if they perform well in tests.     

“马克思主义基本原理概论”课实施专题教学的思考

运用专题教学取代系统讲授,已经成为高校思想政治理论课教学改革与发展的一种新趋势。“马克思主义基本原理概论”课专题教学,首先应合理设计专题,在实施的过程中,要充分利用网络环境构建专题教学信息平台,以多样化的教学方法增强专题教学实效,开展实践教学,拓展专题教学的空间。     

Survivor: Three principles of economics lessons as taught by a reality television show

The reality television show Survivor has been a ratings success on CBS for over 16 years. In the show, 16 strangers are marooned in a remote location, required to compete in physical and mental challenges and periodically vote to eliminate players from the game. The last person remaining wins one million dollars. The author uses this popular television show to demonstrate three important principles of microeconomics: (a) for individual decision-making, concepts like pride and honor may belong in the utility function, alongside more classical components such as consumption of goods and services; (b) considering how others will respond to your action is critical for good economic and strategic thinking; and (c) repeated interaction can help collusive behavior hold.     

Between a rock and a soft place: Ecological and feminist economics in policy debates

The field of ecological economics includes both economic analysis on the one hand, and discussions of normative values and visions for society, on the other. Using feminist insights into cultural beliefs about the relative “hardness” and “softness” of these two sides, this essay discusses how ecological economists can use this unique “between” space in order to better inform policy. The current crisis of global climate change, it is argued, requires that economists move beyond modeling and measurement, while ecological thinkers need to re-examine beliefs about markets and profit.     

Mainstream economics, heterodoxy and academic exclusion: a review essay

Does the mainstream of economic thinking and analysis tend systematically to exclude ideas and approaches that could enrich the field, and, as a consequence, have important questions and issues been shunted aside for nonobjective reasons? Two recent volumes by heterodox economists that address these questions are Geoffrey Hodgson's How Economics Forgot History: The Problem of Historical Specificity in Social Science, and Steve Keen's Debunking Economics: The Naked Emperor of the Social Sciences. I evaluate their claims of academic exclusion and assess the current state of (selective) pluralism within mainstream economics.     

The Preparation and Professionalization of Economics Instructors in Two-Year Colleges

With the rapid growth of two-year colleges and the probability that an increasing proportion of students will get their introductory economics in these institutions comes a natural concern over the quality of instruction found therein. Lewis reviews three surveys dealing with the preparation of junior college teachers of economics, offers explanations for the dearth of well-trained economists in the two-year colleges, and suggests ways of meeting the special needs of junior college teachers. He calls for both pre-service and in-service training programs designed to upgrade the teaching of economics in the two-year colleges.     

Wage determination and returns to education in different ownerships of China: Evidence from quantile regressions

In this paper, quantile regressions is used to estimate wage equations of different ownerships. Quantile regressions give us distributions rather than a single estimate of the returns both to education and experience in each ownership sector. For state-owned enterprises (SOE), the returns to education tended to be larger at the bottom of the conditional distribution of wages in 1991 and 1993, and there was no such trend in 1997. For the private sector, however, the returns to education tended to be larger at the top positions in 1993 and 1997. It is also found that the growth rates of the wages at the bottom of the conditional distribution of wages are higher than those at the top in SOEs. No such patterns for the private sector is found. It is suggested the wage mechanism in the private sector is more market-oriented. __________ Translated from Shijie Jingji Wenhui 世界经济文汇 (World Economic Papers), 2006, (4): 1–26     

The returns to education and wage penalty from overeducation: New evidence from Vietnam

This study intends to estimate the rate of returns to education in Vietnam, the distributive effects of education on wages, and the wage penalty from the incidence of overeducation in the Vietnamese labor market during 2004–2016. This study employs a pseudo-panel approach to address omitted variables bias and the unconditional quantile regression to identify the heterogeneity of returns to education across the income distribution. Our main finding indicates that the estimated rate of returns to education in Vietnam is approximately 6.5%, showing a downward bias from previous estimates. The returns vary across wage distributions, where a lower rate of return is observed in lower quantiles and a higher rate among those individuals at the higher quantiles. The returns to education have declined since 2008, confirming the oversupply of highly educated workers in the Vietnamese labor market with an estimated wage penalty of 17%. Government assistance measures are needed to reduce the overeducation and the wage penalty issues in the Vietnamese labor market.     

The Role of Age and Gender in Educational Expansion: The South Asian Experience in the Global Context

I calculate education Gini coefficients and decompose the overall degree of educational inequality into age, sex, and within‐group components for 171 countries from 1970 to 2010. Doing so enables me to analyze the distributional outcomes of educational expansion. I use South Asia as a case study, as the education distribution in the region is among the most unequal in the world. Generally, educational inequality is decreasing over the observed sample period around the globe. Yet, as improvements are initiated by enhancing the educational opportunities of the young, the gap between cohorts widens in transition phases but vanishes thereafter. Gaps between the sexes are reduced substantially, but widen if either males or females are the first to enter higher education levels. Also, gaps within population subgroups follow a similar trajectory. Instead of a Kuznets‐curve relation, I thus find evidence for educational inequality to evolve in waves as education expands.     

The Scholarship of Teaching Economics

The authors report on the results of a telephone survey of 1,001 employees of seven large corporations conducted for the Business Roundtable as part of its public policy program. A set of 20 questions keyed to the Voluntary National Content Standards in Economics was embedded in the survey. A measure of economic literacy was constructed from the survey results. Greater economic literacy was associated with more overall education, more college economics coursework, high incomes, and being male. An examination of individual test questions revealed that previous college economics had substantial effects on employees' current economic literacy.     

The economics of a stock pollutant: Aldicarb on Long Island

This paper develops a dynamic model of groundwater contamination by the pesticide aldicarb on eastern Long Island. We estimate what the likely concentration would have been under static profit maximization and the marginal damage coefficient implied by the New York State health standard of 7 ppb. Based on our model, it appears that the concentration of aldicarb will not decline below 7 ppb until 1996 and that the shadow price of the current health standard is about $475,000 per year.     

The worth of a songbird: ecological economics as a post-normal science

One of the very valuable features of Ecological Economics is its provision for publications under the rubric ‘Commentary’. In that way, essays which are not research in the strictest sense can still find proper refereed publication, and can be submitted to the further test of open colleague criticism. This paper is intended to be read in that spirit; and where criticisms are made of the work of particular scholars, that is done because of the significance of their contribution.