This paper examines the views of three prominent Wisconsin progressives – Richard T. Ely, Tomas Sewall Adams, and John R. Commons – on taxes as social policy. Wisconsin emerged as a national progressive leader in the 1890s – a ‘laboratory of democracy’ that produced the nation’s...

Existing studies of how note-taking tools affect student learning typically find that students who choose to take notes on a computer perform worse on assessments than students who take notes on paper. To our knowledge, the literature has not disentangled whether this result is due to the...

This paper examines James Buchanan's earliest writings within the context of post-WWII public finance theory and his education at Chicago. Public choice scholars have long recognized their ties to Chicago, but few have examined Chicago's role serving as the primordial soup for Buchanan's later...

We use meta-regression analysis to investigate the extent and nature of the gender gap - that male students outperform otherwise equivalent female students in economics courses. We survey 65 studies containing 279 distinct regressions from the past 30 years and conclude that the gender gap is...

The career and contributions of Roy Blough (1901-2000) are considered as a case study of Wisconsin Institutionalism in government policy-making at mid-century. Faculty member at Cincinnati, Chicago and Columbia, editor of the National Tax Journal, director of the research division of the U.S....

Technological interventions in and out of the classroom have been sold as a way to improve student understanding of economics for decades. Yet despite the panoply of ways to incorporate technology, it is not clear which types of interventions consistently result in statistically significant...

Alvin Hansen and John Williams' Fiscal Policy Seminar at Harvard University is widely regarded as a key mechanism for the spread of Keynesianism in the United States. An original and regular participant, Richard A. Musgrave was invited to prepare remarks for the 50th anniversary of the seminar...

Under the authoritarian rule of Enver Hoxha, Albania pursued one of the more unusual variants of a planned economy, increasingly isolated from the rest of the socialist world. In this paper, we consider the interplay between the Hoxha's policy of economic isolationism and the economics produced...