Working Papers

Efficiency in the Use of Technology in Economics Education: Some Preliminary Results (Sosin, Blecha, Agarwal, Bartlett, Daniel) To appear in the May 2004 issue of the American Economic Review. The Current Status of the TUCE: Results from the CEUTT Project (Sosin, Blecha, Agarwal, Bartlett, Daniel) The large number of students in the CEUTT sample allow us to asses the timeliness of the third edition of the TUCE (1991) in a manner heretofore not possible. We first relate the CEUTT sample to the 1989-90 normed sample using the six criteria used to construct the third edition. We next apply other comparative statistics and conduct several factor analyses. The micro TUCE performs consistently between the two samples. The macro TUCE does not. Factor analysis does not support the grouping of questions into three mutually exclusive categories for either the macro or micro TUCE. Learning By Doing and the Choice of Instructional Technology Abstract: The reluctance of economics instructors to adopt new instructional technologies is shown to be directly related to on-the-job human capital accumulation in existing instructional methods (learning by doing) in the manner suggested by Jovanovic and Nyarko (1996). A logistic regression model and a hazard model are used to estimate the effects of learning by doing variables on the instructional choices of a sample of economists teaching at four-year institutions. The learning by doing variables continue to be significant after age related vintage effects are taken into account.

Formula Funding, Enrollment Events, and Economies of Scale in Higher Education Abstract: From 1973 to 1989, a complex formula manual allocated budget authority to the campuses of the California State University (CSU). Using panel estimation techniques, the complexity of the formula system reduces to a simple DGP for the large CSU campuses. Increases in budgeted enrollment operate as nondecaying events with respect to unit cost and distorted cross-sectional estimates of economies of scale. The results raise new questions about the long-run effects of formula funding and provide a plausible explanation for the lack of an empirical consensus on economies of scale and the marginal cost of instruction.