Georg Schaur

Teaching and Assessment Methods in Undergraduate Economics: A Fourth National Quinquennial Survey

Surveys in 1995, 2000, 2005, and 2010 investigated teaching and assessment methods in different undergraduate courses. In this article, the authors offer basic results from the 2010 survey. “Chalk and talk” remains the dominant teaching style, but there were drops in mean (although not median) values for those pedagogies and some growth in the use of other methods, including class discussion and computer-generated displays. More instructors provided students with problem sets and class notes, and computer lab assignments were increasingly common in econometrics and statistics courses. Experiments are occasionally used in introductory courses but almost never used in other courses. Calculus is not viewed as important by a majority of instructors in any courses but is considered more important in intermediate theory and statistics and econometrics courses.

A Quantile Estimation Approach to Identify Income and Age Variation in the Value of a Statistical Life

In theory, heterogeneity in individual characteristics translates into variation in the marginal willingness to pay for a mortality risk reduction. Two dimensions of heterogeneity, with respect to income and age, have recently received attention due to their policy relevance. We propose a quantile regression approach to simultaneously explore these two sources of heterogeneity and their interactions within the context of the hedonic wage model, the most common revealed preference approach for obtaining value of statistical life estimates. We illustrate the approach using data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS). We find that the impact of age on the wage-risk tradeoff varies across the wage distribution. This result indicates important interactions between age and income heterogeneity. Thus, the conventional mean hedonic wage regression, even when the mean effect is allowed to vary with age, masks important hetereogeneity.

The Impact of Visibility on Trade: Evidence from the World Cup

Success in the FIFA World Cup provides countries with substantial international visibility. This paper uses this information shock associated with the World Cup to show that visibility has a significant impact on trade flows. In isolating the visibility effect, two identification problems are solved. Match outcomes in the World Cup are subject to significant uncertainty. This uncertainty, when combined with controls for economic development, makes World Cup success exogenous to exports. By contrast, hosting the World Cup is potentially endogenous owing to self-selection issues. The paper exploits FIFAs host selection policy to construct exogenous instruments for hosting. The results show that success in the World Cup raises exports temporarily by around 5%.

Factor Uses and the Pattern of Specialization

We show that in the setting of multiple goods and factors, the factor proportions theory has the following prediction: across industries, the impacts of the endowment of a given factor on industry outputs have positive co-variance with the relative uses of this factor. The intuition is that, on average, the industries that use a given factor heavily have positive output responses, following an increase in the endowment of this factor. This co-variation condition is robust to Hicks neutral- and factor-augmenting productivity differences, and constitutes a direct test of the production side of the factor proportions theory. We also show that the co-variation condition finds empirical support. This is evidence that is consistent with the factor proportions theory.

Not Such Innocents Abroad

Little research in economic education has dealt with MBA programs. The authors investigated student performance in a microeconomics/managerial economics course taught in a one-year MBA program at the German International School of Management and Administration in Hanover, Germany, during the 2002–5 academic years. After controlling for other measurable characteristics, students who spoke English as their native language systematically underperformed in the course. The authors suggest this occurred because these students could have attended similar degree programs in their own countries but instead chose to study in Germany to tour Europe between and even during course modules.

School, department, and instructor determinants of teaching methods in undergraduate economics courses

The choice of teaching methods and materials is affected by key school, departmental, and faculty characteristics. We investigate the effects of such characteristics and estimate how much changes in some school and departmental policies affect the probability that economics instructors will use particular teaching methods and materials in four different types of courses. As schools and departments change policies, often in response to changes in resource bases, they may not take into account how that affects faculty teaching and student time investments in coursework. That raises concerns about the relationship between these constraints, policies, and possible decreases in the quality of college graduates.

Has the Caribbean Basin Economic Recovery Act Achieved Its Stated Goals

Abstract This paper examines the impact of CBERA (Caribbean Basin Economic Recovery Act) trade provisions to determine whether the program has achieved its stated goals. A major program enhancement had a negative impact across small beneficiaries, but countries with large manufacturing sectors were able to expand preferential export shares with negligible increases in total exports relative to GDP. Additional evidence supports the view that tariff preferences did not promote economic development in CBERA-eligible countries. Greater utilization of CBERA trade provisions will require expanding coverage to include all products of export interest to beneficiaries and reducing costs associated with administrative regulations and rules of origin.

In Memory of Michael Watts (November 3, 1950-December 5, 2014)

Michael Watts, Professor of Economics at Purdue University, died unexpectedly on December 5, 2014, at the age of 64 while on vacation in Antigua. His connection to the Journal of Economic Education is a long one. For 20 years, from 1988 through 2007, Mike served as the associate editor for JEE’s instruction section, which typically accounts for the largest number of articles published in a JEE issue. After 2007, he continued to serve on JEE’s editorial board. Mike was a remarkable academic and scholar who made significant and wide-ranging contributions to economic education beyond his valuable service to JEE. Mike was born on November 3, 1950, in Medicine Lodge, Kansas, where he lived until he was six. He spent the rest of his childhood and teen years growing up in Kenner, Louisiana. For his higher education, he attended Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, where he earned his BS (1972), MA (1976), and PhD (1978), all in economics. After graduating, he taught for three years at Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis. Mike was hired in 1981 by Purdue University. He spent the rest of his academic career on the economics faculty at Purdue

What Do Teaching Weights Tell Us

Academic departments assign different relative weights to the importance of teaching and research. Those weights are used in making decisions about promotion, tenure, and annual raises. Presumably, raising the teaching weight should encourage faculty to increase time on teaching. Using survey data from U.S. faculty in 1995, 2000, 2005, and 2010, researchers show that at different schools teaching weights overlap extensively but vary, and that within different types of schools, those weights vary systematically based on class sizes in principles and intermediate theory courses, school or enrollment size, and for faculty who are assigned to teach principles classes. If departments and schools use teaching weights as a discretionary policy, successful implementation likely depends on adapting the policies to fit school, department, and faculty characteristics.