The results of three surveys of freshman economics students (2008-2010) at the Waikato Management School, New Zealand, suggest that incoming students have significant levels of prior economics knowledge. Given this head start in knowledge, we have expanded our freshman lecture material with more...

Suppose you are interested in the level of a state variable (e.g. a disease is present or absent or of a pre-specified level of severity, or a failure is recorded or not, etc.) and have a potentially useful but imperfect diagnostic test method, (e.g. a blood test result for this disease, or a...

Fifteen years of copy-editing experience – with theses (both in economics and in several medical fields), journal articles, book chapters and books, conference presentations, government reports, etc. – are distilled here. Papers are often sent to me for “language correction”, but what I...

This classroom experiment introduces students to the notion of credit risk by allowing them to trade on comparable corporate bond issues from two types of markets - investment-grade and high-yield. Investment-grade issues have a lower probability of default than high-yield issues, and thus...

Blogs provide a dynamic interactive medium for online discussion, consistent with communal constructivist pedagogy. This paper explores the use of blogs in the teaching and assessment of a small (40-60 students) introductory economics paper. The role of blogs as a teaching, learning and...

This paper demonstrates that unit root tests can suffer from inflated Type I error rates when data are cointegrated. Results from Monte Carlo simulations show that three commonly used unit root tests – the ADF, Phillips-Perron, and DF-GLS tests – frequently overreject the true null of a unit...

The paper analyses academic journal quality and impact using quality weighted citations that are based on the widely-used Thomson Reuters ISI Web of Science citations database (ISI). A recently developed Index of Citations Quality (ICQ), based on quality weighted citations, is used to analyse...

The paper is concerned with ranking academic journal quality and research impact in Finance, based on the widely-used Thomson Reuters ISI Web of Science citations database. The paper analyses the 89 leading international journals in the ISI category of “Business – Finance” using...

The paper analyses academic journal quality and research impact using quality weighted citations versus total citations, based on the widely-used Thomson Reuters ISI Web of Science citations database (ISI). A new Index of Citations Quality (ICQ) is presented, based on quality weighted citations....

The purpose of the paper is to discuss ten things potential users should know about the limits of the Dynamic Conditional Correlation (DCC) representation for estimating and forecasting time-varying conditional correlations. The reasons given for caution about the use of DCC include the...