Mainstream finance textbooks present valuation formulas of annuities, perpetuities, stocks, and bonds, but the texts seldom explain the story behind them, leaving students in the dark about why these formulas work. The aim of this paper is to illuminate the black box of these formulas, thus...

Regression analysis using panel data for 42 colleges and universities over 14 years suggests that the economics faculty size of universities offering a Ph.D. in economics is determined primarily by the long-run average number of Ph.D. degrees awarded annually; the number of full-time faculty...

We study how class size and composition affect the academic and labor market performances of college students, two crucial policy questions given the secular increase in college enrollment. We rely on the random assignment of students to teaching classes. Our results suggest that a one standard...

Whilst in the US there is a growing debate about the effectiveness of remedial university courses, this issue is less questioned in the UK. Using a regression discontinuity approach and data from a large School of a post-1992 UK university, we estimate the effect of remediation on student...

This article studies the impact that the use of classroom experiments in an economics course may have on student motivation for this subject. In general, two expressions for motivation are effort and persistence, and choice of tasks. We take a sample of pre-university students in the Netherlands...

This paper describes a protocol we have developed for teaching undergraduates to document the statistical analysis they do for empirical research projects in such a way that their results are completely reproducible and verifiable. The protocol is guided by the principle that the documentation...

Using a student evaluation of teaching instrument, students were given the opportunity to evaluate instructors at the beginning and end of the semester. Previous research suggests that end of semester evaluations reflect initial expectations formed at the beginning of the course or even prior to...

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...

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...

We tackle the identification problem of the causal effects of grades on teaching evaluations by implementing a quasi-experimental design on a sample of 100 students of an undergraduate economics class at NYU. A control group has to fill out the evaluations before getting the exams, and the...