Category Archives: Economics for Government Course

The third classroom experiment returns to an exercise that I posted about on 6 March, at the start of semester. At the end of an introductory quiz, I asked the class: Looking around the classroom, what percentile of the relative … Continue reading →

As anyone who has wandered the corridors of an economics faculty knows, we are not a profession known for our sartorial splendour. Australia’s top-ranked economist (according to the RePEC database) is Adrian Pagan, who is rarely seen in anything but … Continue reading →

For anyone teaching an introductory economics course, I can highly recommend complementing a standard textbook with a few exercises from Robert Frank’s The Economic Naturalist. Frank’s notion of economics is as a set of tools that helps us better understand … Continue reading →

Last semester, I decided to run a few experiments with the students in the introductory economics class I was teaching. The first had to do with the power of chocolate in improving test scores. This theory arose from my mother-in-law, … Continue reading →

In tonight’s Economics for Government class, I mentioned Ian Ayres’ work on racial bias in taxi tipping. Here’s his Freakonomics blog post on the topic. So far as I’m aware, no-one has done anything on the economics of tipping in … Continue reading →

I didn’t get time to cover behavioural economics in last night’s final class. For any students interested in it, these two articles give a flavour of the field.

With a little over two weeks to go before the essay is due, this seems the right time to mention that the ANU Academic Skills and Learning Centre is an excellent place to visit if you’re not comfortable with academic … Continue reading →

Following on from our discussion on poverty and inequality in class yesterday, you may wish to read some more on the topic: Xavier Sala-i-Martin from Columbia University, showing that the world distribution has narrowed over the past thirty years (also … Continue reading →