This study investigated the likely effects of undergraduate economics on whether a college graduate has opened a retirement account four years after graduation. Economic education is measured by the number of economics credit hours or whether a college graduate had majored in economics. Additional control variables for the logit analyses include occupation differences, employment record, and some demographics. Completing an undergraduate course in economics is significantly associated with having a retirement account, and economics majors are more likely than some other majors to have a retirement account. The analysis uses college transcript data from the Baccalaureate and Beyond study ( nces.ed.gov/surveys/b&b/ ).

Differences in student learning associated with different instructors in three types of principles of economics courses are estimated using a fixed- and random-effects specification for an educational production function. Results show a wide variance in these instructor effects and that this variance increases directly with the amount of latitude instructors are given in the classroom.

What Students Remember and Say about College Economics Years Later by Sam Allgood, William Bosshardt, Wilbert van der Klaauw and Michael Watts. Published in volume 94, issue 2, pages 259-265 of American Economic Review, May 2004

We conducted a national survey of department Chairs to investigate whether departments of economics changed course requirements for bachelors degrees since the Siegfried and Bidani (1992) paper using 1980 data. There have been few changes to course requirements. Most notable are a large increase in the number of departments requiring econometrics and a drop in departments requiring courses such as money, banking and economic history--courses once required in many business schools.