This report is first in a series of informational briefings developed as part of "The Guardians Initiative: Reclaiming the Public Trust," an effort to educate and engage trustees as advocates on key issues in higher education. While the tone of public criticism of higher education has sharpened, public understanding about the sector's…

President Obama is right to draw attention to the soaring cost of a college education in America. However, his proposed solution will not only fail to fix the problem but is also likely to compound it by blunting the competition that is needed to shake up the world of higher education. President Obama proposes to slow tuition growth by…

A heuristic approach to explaining of the Black-Scholes option pricing model in undergraduate classes is described. The approach draws upon the method of protocol analysis to encourage students to "think aloud" so that their mental models can be surfaced. It also relies upon extensive visualizations to communicate relationships that are…

Using store-level and aggregated Consumer Price Index data, we show that restaurant prices rise in response to minimum wage increases under several sources of identifying variation. We introduce a general model of employment determination that implies minimum wage hikes cause prices to rise in competitive labor markets but potentially fall in…

Proves price index (proportion of references within the last five years of literature) is not a pure function of the mean or median reference age, but a well-defined relation in the form of a typical cloud of points. Compares models for analyzing price index (decreasing exponential and lognormal aging) and explains cloud using results from…

This paper contains a policy model for tuition discounting that avoids the major financial pitfalls encountered in the administration of institutional scholarships. The dual objective of maximizing the funded scholarship discount rate and minimizing the unfunded discount rate is explained. Marginal cost pricing is the accepted criterion for…