Travis Roach

The Friday Flip: New Methods to Increase Interaction and Active Learning in Economics

The “flipped classroom” has begun to revolutionize the way that students receive information from their teachers and is ushering in a new era of active and creative thinkers. Although flipping the classroom has gained a great deal of popular attention in magazines and blog posts by education researchers, very little research has focused on the effectiveness or feasibility of flipping the classroom at the collegiate level. This paper documents the implementation of a “partially-flipped” class over one semester of a large enrollment microeconomics course, as well as presents results of students’ perception towards flipped learning.

Regulated and Unregulated Substitutes: Aversion Effects of an Ethanol Mandate

One approach for handling more aggressive goals under an ethanol mandate is to use a “dual blend” mandate in which both the preferred new ethanol blend and the old (possibly ethanol‐free) blend of gasoline coexist. Highlighting the case of New South Wales, Australia, we show the dual nature of such a mandate can potentially lead to significant costs when consumers are averse. We show consumers en masse rejected the new blend and paid 43 cents per gallon more to avoid it. Not even the second of the mandates four targets could be reached, and the consumer cost was substantial.

On the nature and causes of carbon dioxide emissions in the United States

This letter estimates the long-run impacts of shocks to real disposable personal income on the environment in the United States through the use of a structural vector autoregression model. Coal use in the electricity sector and vehicle use data are considered specifically as these are major contributors to carbon dioxide emissions and capture demand from both firms and households.

Renewable energy and low-carbon policy spillover effects on natural gas demand

ABSTRACT Recent legislation intended to increase the use of renewable energy sources and lower the amount of carbon dioxide emissions from energy has changed the structure of energy markets. The effect of these policies on carbon-intensive fuel sources is rather obvious. For natural gas, though, the effect is not immediately clear. This letter uses a structural model of natural gas demand to uncover whether these policies have led to increased demand because natural gas is a relatively clean source of energy that couples well with renewables or if these policies have crowded out natural gas on net.

A State-Level Analysis of Carbon Dioxide Emissions in the United States

As climate change and the regulation of carbon dioxide emissions play an increasingly important role in the global policy debate, careful consideration of the local determinants driving emissions must be considered. The importance of local determinants in the transmission of carbon dioxide matters especially for a country that differs from coast to coast in energy use and industry makeup like the United States. To add to the policy debate this paper estimates two models that account for the dynamic nature of emissions of carbon dioxide emissions at the state-level from 1980-2010 while taking account of scale, technique, and composition effects. When stochastic trends are taken account of, an environmental Kuznets curve relationship with a feasible turning point is found for carbon dioxide emissions.

The Benefits of Asynchronous Discussion in a Hybrid Economics Course: Evidence from a Large Enrollment Economics Course

As improvements in technology continue to be integrated within the collegiate classroom it is important to study the benefits, or costs, that are associated with adopting new pedagogical practices. This paper focuses on the role that asynchronous discussion can play in furthering student development within a hybrid economics course. Specifically, this paper finds that encouraging online discussion of articles, podcasts, and videos that are related to course material results in better academic performance.