Articulating thoughtful learning outcome statements for courses and majors improves teaching and learning and satisfies accreditation requirements. After reading this paper, economists will be able to construct learning outcome statements that guide and enhance teaching and learning in their courses and programs. We present a framework for developing learning outcomes based on a set of five fundamental competencies in economics. We then provide another public good, offering a complete set of learning outcomes for an introductory microeconomics course, which instructors can include in their syllabi. For additional guidance, we construct examples of lesson-specific learning outcomes as well.

We present analytic formulas for calculating marginal welfare costs when taxes are levied against the wages of a heterogeneous population of households and marginal tax revenue finances either the supply of a public good or lump‐sum transfers. The formulas are applied to explain the wide discrepancy between estimates of marginal welfare costs for redistribution previously obtained through computer simulation procedures. Our calculations reveal that these procedures introduced lump‐sum transfers that were not specified as part of the reforms to be simulated, but explain most of the differences between their estimates. We also show that welfare cost estimates are quite sensitive to the elasticity of labor supply with respect to exhaustive public spending.

Are CEO initial compensation packages based on variations in the expected match quality of the hiring firms? Using CEO tenure as a proxy for expected match quality, and a sample of CEO turnovers between 1992 and 2006, we find that CEOs that experience good matches, defined as tenures exceeding four years, have higher initial compensation packages. We also find evidence from exogenous switching regression models that inside CEOs receive a higher good match premium than outside CEOs. To account for economic and regulatory changes across our sample period, we divide our sample into three subsamples: 1992–1997, 1998–2002, and 2003–2006, and repeat our analyses. Even though the positive relation between expected match quality and initial compensation persists across all periods, we find that the good match premium for inside and outside CEOs does not differ in the post-2002 period. We attribute this result to increased board independence and changes in regulation (Sarbanes–Oxley) in the post-2002 sample period.

If college seniors who have taken an economics course were asked questions that test their knowledge of basic economics, what would the results show? Would seniors give correct answers to most questions, or would they show significant deficiencies? Students are exposed to many ideas during their undergraduate education, so one would not expect them to retain all of the economic content they were taught, but one would hope that they would retain at least a knowledge of basic economics. This study investigates whether that is the case. Two data sources were used for the study. The first was from a Gallup survey of a national random sample of 300 college seniors (Walstad and Max Larsen, 1992). The survey includes 15 multiple-choice questions testing economic knowledge. The responses from that survey can be separated according to whether students took economics. The second data set came from the economics scores for 12,854 students who took the Major Field Test in Business II (MFTB) sponsored by Higher Education Assessment of the Educational Testing Service (ETS, 1998). The MFTB covers content typically taught in an undergraduate program in business and contains about 20 multiple-choice questions on basic economics. Although there are differences between the two data sets, we viewed this as an advantage for our study. Our hypothesis is that most college seniors would show relatively limited knowledge of basic economics, no matter what questions were asked or how the data were collected. We expected students responding to the Gallup questions to score higher than students taking the MFTB because the Gallup questions were simpler and designed for telephone interviews. The MFTB, by contrast, is a standardized achievement test with definitions and analytical questions of the type that would be used in course exams for Principles of Economics. With both sets of test data, however, we expected to find significant gaps in the economic knowledge of college seniors.

This study investigates three questions: (i) are there differences in teaching and research behavior between economists and other professors; (ii) do economists in the top 100 research departments allocate time differently than faculty in other disciplines at similarly ranked departments; and (iii) do professors respond to changes in incentives in allocating their time? The study uses data from the National Study of Postsecondary Faculty (NSOPF). The study specifies a regression equation controlling for institutional incentives to compare time allocation to teaching and research for economics professors and faculty members in math, physics, psychology, political science and business.

Anecdotes are often quite suggestive. A graduate student in economics who was serving as a teaching assistant once reported that his major professor came into his office and told him that he was spending too much of his time helping his undergraduate students and not enough time on his research. Was the professor expressing a preference for time spent on teaching over research? Or was the professor suggesting to the student that the academic market rewards research more than teaching? Regardless, the underlying message that gets transferred from such an experience, as early as graduate education and perhaps throughout a career, is that teaching is not as important or valuable as research. Such strong conclusions, however, should not be based on anecdotal evidence. Whether economics professors are less interested in teaching and more interested in research is an empirical question worthy of study. Although teaching and research choices made by economics faculty members reflect both preferences and choice sets, in this study we focus on preferences and use a national survey to compare the teaching and research views of economists with faculty members in other major disciplines.