A microeconomics principles course employing random assignment across three sections with different teaching models is used to explore learning outcomes as measured by a cumulative final exam for students who participate in traditional face-to-face classroom instruction, blended face-to-face and online instruction with reduced instructor contact time, and a purely online instructional format. Evidence indicates learning outcomes were reduced for students in the purely online section relative to those in the face-to-face format by 5 to 10 points on a cumulative final exam. No statistically significant differences in outcomes are observed for students in the blended relative to the face-to-face section.

Does monitoring corrupt activities induce a sustained reduction in corruption? Using longitudinal data on audits of municipal governments in Puerto Rico, we show corruption is considerably lower in municipalities with timely audits—before elections. However, these municipalities do not exhibit decreased levels of corruption in subsequent audits, even while mayors in these benefit from higher reelection rates. Our results suggest that audits enable voters to select responsive but corruptible politicians to office. Audit programs must disseminate results when they are most relevant for voters—shortly before an election—and ensure that these programs are sustained, long-term commitments.

We combine matched Danish worker-firm-trade data with detailed individual-worker training data. We find: 1) workers displaced from offshoring firms take up more vocational-training and have a harder time getting re-attached to the labor-force than other displaced workers, and they also exhibit higher vocational-training take-up rates 2 years before layoffs; 2) the staying workers with offshoring firms take up more vocational-training than those with non-offshoring firms; and 3) the post-secondary-training take-up rates for displaced workers are no different than for the general population.

Using a large dataset on web browsing and purchasing behavior we test to what extent consumers are searching in accordance to various search models. We find that the benchmark model of sequential search with a known price distribution can be rejected based on recall patterns found in the data as well as the absence of dependence of search decisions on prices. Our findings suggest fixed sample size search provides a more accurate description of search behavior. We then utilize the fixed sample size search model to estimate demand elasticities of online bookstores in an environment where store preferences are heterogeneous.

Risk Preferences in the PSID: Individual Imputations and Family Covariation by Miles S. Kimball, Claudia R. Sahm and Matthew D. Shapiro. Published in volume 99, issue 2, pages 363-68 of American Economic Review, May 2009

This paper studies the second-moment properties of offshoring, the arrangement whereby firms carry out particular stages of production abroad. It documents a new empirical regularity: maquiladora industries in Mexico that are associated with US offshoring experience fluctuations in employment that are twice as volatile as the corresponding industries in the United States. This finding is not attributable simply to higher volatility in the overall Mexican economy, nor to the smaller size of Mexico's industries compared to US counterparts.

We examine the impacts of increased US gasoline taxes in a model that links the markets for new, used, and scrapped vehicles and recognizes the considerable heterogeneity among households and cars. Household choice parameters derive from an estimation procedure that integrates individual choices for car ownership and miles traveled. We find that each cent-per-gallon increase in the price of gasoline reduces the equilibrium gasoline consumption by about 0.2 percent. Taking account of revenue recycling, the impact of a 25-cent gasoline tax increase on the average household is about $30 per year (2001 dollars). Distributional impacts depend importantly on how additional revenues from the tax increase are recycled.

While neoclassical models assume static cost-minimization by firms, agency models suggest that firms may not minimize costs in less-competitive or regulated environments. We test this using a transition from cost-of-service regulation to market-oriented environments for many US electric generating plants. Our estimates of input demand suggest that publicly owned plants, whose owners were largely insulated from these reforms, experienced the smallest efficiency gains, while investor-owned plants in states that restructured their wholesale electricity markets improved the most. The results suggest modest medium-term efficiency benefits from replacing regulated monopoly with a market-based industry structure.

In recent financial crises and in recent theoretical studies of them, abrupt declines in capital inflows, or sudden stops, have been linked with large drops in output. Do sudden stops cause output drops? No, according to a standard equilibrium model in which sudden stops are generated by an abrupt tightening of a country?s collateral constraint on foreign borrowing. In this model, in fact, sudden stops lead to output increases, not decreases. An examination of the quantitative effects of a well-known sudden stop, in Mexico in the mid-1990s, confirms that a drop in output accompanying a sudden stop cannot be accounted for by the sudden stop alone. To generate an output drop during a financial crisis, as other studies have done, the model must include other economic frictions which have negative effects on output large enough to overwhelm the positive effect of the sudden stop.

Collusive Practices in Repeated English Auctions: Experimental Evidence on Bidding Rings by Owen R. Phillips, Dale J. Menkhaus and Kalyn T. Coatney. Published in volume 93, issue 3, pages 965-979 of American Economic Review, June 2003