Fifty years ago this Journal published Simon Rottenberg’s “The Baseball Players’ Labor Market,” the first professional journal article in sports economics. In this retrospective we review some of his insights and analyses with regard to competitive balance, constraints on payroll and freedoms to contract, revenue sharing, territorial rights, and the supply of talent. We also note subsequent industry developments Rottenberg could not have anticipated and identify where he was ahead of his time.

This survey summarizes the main research findings about teaching economics to undergraduates. After briefly reviewing the history of research on undergraduate economic education, it discusses the status of the economics major—numbers and trends, goals, coursework, outcomes, and the principles courses. Some economic theory is used to explain the likely effects of pedagogical decisions of faculty and the learning choices that students make. Major results from empirical research are reviewed from the professor perspective on such topics as teaching methods, online technology, class size, and textbooks. Studies of student learning are discussed in relation to study time, grades, attendance, math aptitude, and cheating. The last section discusses changes in the composition of faculty who teach undergraduate economics and effects from changes in instructional technology and then presents findings from the research about measuring teaching effectiveness and the value of teacher training.

This paper explores the relationship between a differentiated brand's market share and its price in the context of a model that recognizes the endogeneity of the brand's advertising behavior and pricing decisions. The empirical analysis suggests that General Foods charged higher prices for its regular-grind Maxwell House coffee in geographic areas where the brand's market share was relatively large. Available cross-sectional, time-series data and company documents suggest that this empirical relationship is attributable to the preference grocery retailers have for putting dominant coffee brands on special, rather than cross-sectional variations in costs, market concentration, or consumer tastes.

Use It or Lose It: Teaching Literacy in the Economics Principles Course by W. Lee Hansen, Michael K. Salemi and John J. Siegfried. Published in volume 92, issue 2, pages 463-472 of American Economic Review, May 2002