By Laura Tropp. My son has been participating as a member of a team for Destination Imagination. It’s a pretty interesting organization, which I think of as a kind of sports league for geeks, culminating in a giant nerd Olympics (being a nerd myself, this is something I can get behind). Read more...

By Laura Tropp. I set up one of those school lunch accounts for my children. I did this at the beginning of the school year, and now every time they want to buy lunch or purchase a snack, they can just give their names at the register. Read more...

By Rosemarie Emanuele. In Labor Economics, we often talk of education as “human capital investment.” A person attending school of some kind is seen as making decisions similar to the investments made when people purchase capital, usually in the form of machines or equipment, for their companies. Read more...

By Rosemarie Emanuele. In one of my math classes, my students learn how to calculate the day of the week on which any selected date falls. On what day of the week was your grandmother born? On what day of the week did the Civil War begin? Answers to these questions can be answered easily. Read more...

By Rosemarie Emanuele. Years ago, a former student told me that he suspected that I found examples of Economics everywhere I looked, which is basically true. I thought of this comment a few weeks ago when one of the top economists in my sub-field sent me a reference to the classic paper “A Disneyland Dilemma: Two-Part Tariffs for a Mickey Mouse Monopoly” when he heard that I would be going to Disneyworld for my daughter’s spring break. Read more...

By Rosemarie Emanuele. Central to the study of Calculus and much of Science is the examination of how things change over time. Indeed, “comparative statics” also plays an important role in Economics, where the way things are (such as a combination of price and output at any time) are compared with the way things were (such as a combination of price and output at an earlier time.) Read more...