The Position of Women in UK Academic Economics

This paper reports the results of the Royal Economic Society Women's Committee 1998 survey on the gender balance in UK academic economics. In 1998, female representation was 4%fessors, 11% of senior lecturers or readers, 17% of permanent lecturers, 28% of fixed term lecturers, and 33% of PhD/research students. The main growth in female representation since 1996 has been in fixed term lectureships and in PhD/research students (a 5 percentage point increase for each). We suggest reasons for the low representation of women in academic economics, and also argue that it is a cause for concern.     

A Model of Economics Learning in the High Schools

The effectiveness of the Developmental Economic Education Project (DEEP) of the Joint Council of Economic Education (JCEE) and the International Paper Company Foundation (IPCF) awards program for teaching economics is evaluated in this article. The effects these programs have on achievement in economics (ACH), attitudes towards economics as a subject (ATE), and economic attitude sophistication (EAS) are observed. The authors' study shows that DEEP schools had a positive effect on students in these three areas. The results of the IPCF program are less encouraging with students actually showing less economic understanding as a consequence of being taught by an award winning teacher.     

Teacher and Student Economic Understanding in Transition Economies

This study describes a new data set and uses it for an exploratory investigation of whether seminars for teachers conducted by the National Council on Economic Education through its International Education Exchange Program (IEEP) had a beneficial effect on the economic understanding of the high school students of these teachers. The data were collected using a non-equivalent control group design that sorted teachers into two groups based on whether or not they participated in an IEEP seminar. Pre- and posttests of economics were administered to the students of these teachers in Lithuania, Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan, and Poland. The exploratory results showed a larger increase in the economic understanding of students of teachers who participated in the IEEP seminars compared with students of teachers who did not. The results also showed that knowledge of economics among IEEP teachers was a factor for improving student achievement in economics. The findings should be viewed with caution because of data limitations.     

Economic Education in Korea: Current Status and Changes

The authors describe key aspects of precollege and undergraduate economic education in Korea. They show that precollege students seem to have low economics literacy due to problems with the curriculum and insufficient training of teachers. At the undergraduate level, they show that economics departments have more male students than female students and that the employment rate for economics majors is lower than for business majors. They hope to draw more of Korean economists' attention to research initiatives in economic education.     

Teaching College Economics in the High Schools: The Role of Concurrent Enrollment Programs

The authors examine concurrent enrollment programs (CEP) as an effective means of teaching college economics in high school. They describe the establishment of the National Alliance of Concurrent Enrollment Partnerships to set national standards for CEP. They also investigate the performance of high school students taking the Syracuse University one-semester micro/macro principles of economics course through its CEP, Project Advance, on the Test of Economic Literacy. CEP students average nearly 1 percentage point higher than do the advanced placement/honors economics group and score considerably better in fundamentals and international economics. By cognitive levels, CEP students score over 4 percentage points in the knowledge area and exhibit better performance on application questions.     

Relative inflation dynamics in the new EU member countries of Central and Eastern Europe

Following their EU accession, the new member countries from Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) must achieve sustainable price stability as one of the pre-conditions for joining the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) and adopting the euro. This article examines the distribution dynamics of inflation rates in ten new EU members from CEE relative to the EMU accession benchmark inflation over the period 1990–2009. In contrast to previous studies, we use nonparametric methods to test for convergence in inflation rates between CEE and the EMU benchmark as well as within the CEE sample. Over the entire sample period, we detect a general shift in the CEE inflation distribution toward the EMU benchmark along with intradistributional convergence. However, this process is not uniform. In the early years, it was equally likely for CEE inflation rates to move toward or away from the benchmark. The resulting multimodal distribution gave way to a unimodal distribution in the years leading up to the EU accession, accompanied by a marked shift toward the EMU benchmark. In more recent years, emergence of a bimodal distribution signaled the stratification of relative inflation in CEE into two convergence clubs, which has intensified since the start of the global economic crisis.     

A Survey of Economic Understanding in U.S. High Schools

The recent widespread adoption of online competitions in economic education provides a unique opportunity to make frequent assessments of economic literacy in U.S. classrooms. In this survey, student responses to test items from the Test of Economic Literacy (TEL) are used to create economic concept and content area achievement benchmarks. These benchmarks provide an interim renorming of the TEL and allow the authors to gauge the status of economic understanding among high school students. The data also allow the authors to compare learning outcomes between regular and advanced economics classes. Finally, the authors find that students in advanced economics classes significantly outperform students in regular classes.     

Gordon Tullock and Richard McKenzie. The New World of Economics.

The authors extend the literature on the efficacy of high school economics instruction in two directions. First, they assess how much economic knowledge that California students acquired in their compulsory high school course is retained on their entering college. Second, using as a control group some college students from the state of Washington, where there is no mandate for high school economics instruction, the authors evaluate the impact of California's high school economics mandate on students’ economic literacy when they enter college. The testing instrument is the Test of Economic Literacy (TEL).     

Take My Course,Please: The Effects of the Principles Experience on Student Curriculum Choice

Using a large multi-school sample, the authors examined how the characteristics and attitudes of students interact with the pedagogy and attributes of the instructor to influence students' decisions to study economics beyond the first semester. They found that students who have a predisposition to major in economics, who find economics relevant, who believe they understand economics as well as their classmates, and who expect higher grades in economics relative to their other classes are more likely to continue. They found evidence that teaching techniques and evaluation methods influence all of these factors except for the predisposition to major in economics. Some, but not all, of these techniques are particularly successful in influencing the decisions of female students.     

Economic reform of the electricity industries of Central and Eastern Europe

The purpose of the paper is the following: firstly, to chart how much economic reform of CEE electricity industries has taken place to date; secondly, to discuss why progress has been so limited; and thirdly, to consider the prospects over the next few years. In charting economic progress to date, we will consider and discuss progress in electricity price unbundling and rebalancing; in utility commercialization, in industry and market restructuring and liberalization; and in privatization, as well as the development of economic regulation. For the reasons outlined above, we will explore the pricing issues in some detail as they are essential for understanding the difficulties in making progress in the other aspects of economic reform. The analysis concentrates on the ten countries with which the EU has and Association Agreement and who are stated candidates for EU membership (the EU 10).     

Sugar daddy u: human capital investment and the university-based supply of ‘romantic arrangements’

To deal with the financial hardships associated with rising college tuition, many female college students in the U.S. are turning to risqué forms of financing human capital investments, such as agreeing to potentially lucrative ‘romantic arrangements’ with older males, referred to as ‘sugar daddies,’ through the largest Internet-based club in the industry. Yet despite this recent trend, there is a relative paucity of published academic research on the economics of such behaviour. Using data from the more than 220 nationally ranked (by U.S. News & World Report’s America’s Best Colleges) colleges and universities in the U.S., presents results from both Poisson and scaled Poisson estimation suggesting that large, high-cost universities that are located in larger cities or where unemployment rates are higher lead the nation in the number of female students choosing such romantic arrangements in order to fund higher education. Moreover, those institutions that are chosen by more physically attractive female students, and those that enrol a higher percentage of female students, are also generating greater numbers of female student entrants into the sugar daddy industry. Each of these findings has implications for the human capital literature and the growing body of academic literature on the economics of beauty.     

Regions of the Production Function,Returns, and Economies of Scale: A Reply

The author discusses a pedagogical strategy based on data visualization and analysis in the teaching of intermediate macroeconomics and financial economics. In these short projects, students collect and manipulate economic data from the online Federal Reserve Economic Database (FRED) in order to illustrate theoretical relationships discussed in class. All the data collection and manipulation tasks are conducted through the FRED Web site. The author argues that as students locate and effectively use the quantitative information that they need to evaluate abstract concepts, they are in effect developing the connection between theories and empirical evidence that underpins the discipline of economics.     

经济地理学与经济学关系的历史考察

经济地理学发展不仅与人文地理的其他分支交互发展,并从包括经济学在内的社会科学内吸收营养。文章通过历史性地考察经济地理学与经济学关系,尝试探索经济地理学未来的发展趋势。通过考察发现:古典经济地理学时期,经济地理学与经济学相互交织、彼此影响;1930、1940时代到1970、1980年代,经济学引领经济地理发展,而经济地理学者没有对主流经济学产生重大影响;1980年代末和1990年代初期,经济地理学吸收经济学相关理论,实现了文化、制度和关系的转向,同时主流经济学则出现了地理化趋势,出现了新经济地理学运动。1980年代以来,演化思想在经济学界逐渐兴盛起来,演化经济学理论已得到越来越多的经济学家的重视,在20世纪90年代,经济地理学家接受了演化经济学的基本概念,开始尝试构建演化经济地理学理论框架。演化经济地理学是经济地理和经济学的下一个交叉点。     

Globalization and economic growth: Evidence from two decades of transition in CEE

This paper examines the role of various aspects of globalization for economic growth in ten CEE economies. In contrary to previous papers, we restrict our analysis solely to the first two decades of transition. Using the globalization indexes published by the Swiss Economic Institute, we found strong and robust evidence of growth-stimulating effect of globalization processes, especially in social and economic dimensions. On the other hand, the role of political dimension of globalization was not found to be statistically significant in any research variant.The result, which seems to be particularly interesting, is that the development of the internet, television and trade in newspapers (the social dimension of globalization) had at least as strong positive impact on economic development in CEE economies in the first two decades of transition as the rise in international trade, growth of foreign investment, reduction of import barriers and development of a tax policy (the economic dimension).     

On Measuring Economic Attitudes

The authors examine two affective-domain instruments: one designed to measure the attitudes of students toward economics, and the other, their relative economic attitude sophistication. The development of these measurement tools was commissioned by the Joint Council on Economic Education in 1979. The result is the nationally normed and externally validated, 28-item, two-part Survey on Economic Attitudes reproduced in the appendix of this article. For the first time, the profession has available, for research purposes, an acceptable instrument for measuring changes in student attitudes and opinions as one of the outputs of the instructional process.     

Reviewers for Volume 41

The authors document the types of undergraduate colleges and universities attended by those who earned a doctorate in economics from an American university from 1966 through 2003. They examine relationships between type of undergraduate institution and attrition and time-to-degree in PhD programs. The total number of new economics PhDs awarded to U.S. citizens has declined precipitously over the past 30 years. Concurrently, the number of new economics doctorates who hold undergraduate degrees from U.S. universities has fallen by half, from a high of about 800 in 1972 to about 400 in 2003. Among those who have earned undergraduate degrees from American institutions, the mix of schools attended by the doctorates has remained relatively stable, with about 55 percent of those who earn a PhD in economics each year holding their bachelor's degree from a university that offers a PhD in economics and a bit more than 10 percent holding a bachelors degree from a selective liberal arts college. Currently, 18 of the 25 American undergraduate institutions that send the largest percentage of their graduating classes on to earn a PhD in economics are liberal arts colleges. Graduates of liberal arts colleges also have shorter time-to-degree and higher verbal Graduate Record Exam (GRE) scores than other economics PhD students.     

Effect of Graduate-Program Rank on Success in the Job Market

Economic educators often profess the goal of teaching our students to “think like economists.” Since Siegfried and colleagues (1991) coined this phrase, its meaning has been interpreted as a focus on analytical concepts and methods of economics as opposed to the broader goal of preparing students for independent, critical thought in the complex world beyond college. Colander and McGoldrick (2009b) argued that students are more likely to achieve both of these objectives when the learning process includes open-ended questions that encourage them to move beyond algorithmic application of textbook principles. In this article, the authors operationalize this “big think” approach through an instructional module on differential tuition pricing, the development of which was enhanced by careful attention to contemporary learning theory.     

中国经济学与诺贝尔经济学奖差距研究

关于中国经济学与诺贝尔经济学奖的差距：（1）中国的经济学起步晚;（2）浓重的意识形态,导致对经济学理论理解的偏颇,使建国后的经济学在很大程度上误入歧途;（3）经济学研究方法的僵化与落后。     

EVIDENCE ON THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN ECONOMICS AND CRITICAL THINKING SKILLS

This research provides empirical support for the hypothesis that learning economics increases a student's critical thinking skills. Using the short form of the Watson-Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal (WGCTA-S) as our measure of critical thinking skills, we find that students who gain a high level of economic understanding in their introductory economics class, as measured by the Test of Understanding College Economics (TUCE), have statistically significant gains in their WGCTA-S scores. Students who spend more time taking classes and are more fully engaged in the university experience also have greater gains in critical thinking. These results lend support to the idea that introductory economics courses can work in concert with other university level courses, especially within the context of a full-time curriculum, to enhance critical thinking skills. ( JEL A22)     

论经济发展的本质与动力

经济发展不等同于经济增长。无论是发展经济学,还是传统的政治经济学,对经济发展的研究都很不充分,不能为发展中国家提供理论指导。笔者认为,从本质上讲,经济发展就是劳动整体的技能水平提高,社会发展的动力是劳动,是劳动主体的智力因素。以往经济学对经济发展研究存在两种认识上的偏差:一是过于强调经济发展中物的作用,二是笼统解释经济发展中人的作用,对高智力复杂劳动的意义估计不充分。