Learning Objectives and Testing: An Analysis of Six Principles of Economics Textbooks,Using Bloom's Taxonomy

This study applies Bloom's Taxonomy of Educational Objectives to six principles of economics textboks and the accompanying instructor's manuals to determine whether the test banks provided are likely to measure the textbooks' stated objectives. The study finds significant discrepancies between the stated objectives of most textbooks and the instruments included in the instructor's manuals to measure student achievement.     

Barter Trading as a Microeconomics Teaching Device

Karpoff reports on a “barter trading game” in which students exchanged real goods over a period of seven weeks with different market constraints imposed each week. Student comments about the exercise were favorable.     

The Aggregate Demand Curve and Its Proper Interpretation

Textbook authors, in their presentations of aggregate demand–aggregate supply, are admonished to set their houses in order. The writers suggest the continued usefulness of the traditional “Keynesian cross” model as a pedagogical device and present a version that they allege to be superior to the popular AD–AS models found in many contemporary texts.     

Textbook Treatments of the Financial Market in the IS-LM Model

Intermediate macroeconomics textbooks introduce financial markets into the IS-LM analysis but typically as a beginning-of-period consideration. Here the financial market is introduced in an end-of-period model.     

Simulating Price-Taking

In this article, the author presents a price-takers’ market simulation geared toward principles-level students. This simulation demonstrates that price-taking behavior is a natural result of the conditions that create perfect competition. In trials, there is a significant degree of price convergence in just three or four rounds. Students find this simulation to be a fun, educational experience that adds value to their understanding of competitive markets.     

Annual Meeting of the Catholic Economic Association

This paper attempts to demonstrate that Keynes's practical writings on the crisis in the Lancashire cotton spinning industry in the 1920s were consistent with the 1930s theoretical conceptualisation of user costs in the General Theory. It is suggested that the key (common) link between these analyses is Keynes's concern with how uncertainty is distributed, in specific historical circumstances, between institutions at the levels of the firm, industry, the industry-financial institution interface, and the local and global economies. It is this concern which still has important, if not more, research and policy relevance today.     

Minutes of Spring Council Meeting, 1966, of the Catholic Economic Association

Alongside neo-classical supply-side analysis, there was the emergence in the 1980s of a new strand of anlysis seeking to develop a social-institutional perspective on the supply-side of modern industrial economies. This paper contrasts the views of labor market ‘flexibility’ provided by neo-classical analysts and supporters of deregulation with those of the Flexible Specialization and Diversified Quality Production theorists and assesses the strengths and weaknesses of Flexible Specialization in comparison to its main ‘institutionalist’ rival. It concludes that the anlysis of ‘supply-side institutionalism’ and the evidence provided by important empirically based studies, suggests that public policy directed towards: optimizing job training, promoting employee participation and inter-firm co-operation, and restricting the ability of firms to indulge in short-termism will be most productive in promoting the cause of socially progressive industrial production and ‘goodwork’.     

Costs and benefits of housing subsidies to tenants from voluntary and involuntary rent control: a comparison between tenures and income groups

This paper estimates the economic subsides to housing for different groups using the 1988 Joseph Rowntree Memorial Trust sample survey of households.An Olsen type model is used to estimate consumber surplus to households from subsidized housing.These estimates are compared to costs, and housing services in the owner occupier market. Poorer families receive larger benefits than richer families. Transfer efficiency is not high; but the local authority sector receives the greatest benefits from controlled rents.