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...

The purpose of this chapter is to share some general thoughts about teaching the broad undergraduate public economics course that might be helpful to new teachers of this course and some ideas about dealing with particular topics that might be useful to even experienced teachers. Like others who...

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...

Does playing a game in class improve students' ability to analyze the game using game theory? We report results from an experimental design which allows us to test a series of related hypotheses. We fail to find support for the conjectured learning-enhancing effects and discuss what lessons can...

I use a role-playing simulation in two sections of my Introduction to International Relations course at the U.S. Naval Academy to test whether exposure to different theories on international relations and models of decision-making lead to different simulation outcome. I complement this testing...

Existing texts in economic development do not explain why micro credit loans often carry very high interest rates. Since many students are likely to perceive high interest rates on loans to the very poor as unfair or exploitative, I develop a simple model of a lending firm in which the necessity...

Student evaluations of teaching represent an economic behavior between professors and students and have been viewed as a game. In this paper, I apply a static game to address their behaviors and determine a Nash Equilibrium. Moreover, a simultaneous framework is developed to investigate the...

The model of perfect competition from the perspective of an active learner. The story told about the competitive process is shown to be problematic when students try to reconstruct it for themselves. In particular it has great potential to generate cognitive dissonance. An alternative approach...

A large literature has recently developed to place the New Keynesian framework for analyzing business cycle fluctuations and the conduct of monetary policy into undergraduate economics curricula. New Keynesian models offer several attractive modeling aspects: straightforward linear...

Previous research has examined the factors affecting student learning and academic performance, including attendance, prior GPA, and college entrance exam scores. This study seeks to expand the literature with a data set for introductory macroeconomics classes at a public liberal art college....