In this article, the authors describe an interactive classroom simulation that helps students learn some of the most important ideas from models of international trade with heterogeneous firms. Students make entry/exit decisions for individual firms with different marginal costs of production. The simulation consists of five rounds, beginning with…

In this study, the author describes a classroom experiment on new trade theory appropriate for undergraduate international economics and trade courses. Students portray U.S. and Japanese automobile manufacturers with different average cost schedules. There are five rounds in the experiment, starting with autarky in the 1960s and ending with the…

In this article, the author describes a classroom activity for use in introductory economics courses to motivate the study of international trade. The learning activity highlights the importance of international trade in students' everyday lives by having students inventory their on-hand belongings and identify where the items were manufactured.…

The author of this article expands the background theory of voting to incorporate the undergraduate majors of members of Congress. Examining nine votes on trade across the 109th and 110th Congresses reveals that economics majors are the only category of college major to vote in favor of free trade in a predictable way. Controls for a variety of…

Over 20 years ago, the late William Zahka (1990, 1998) outlined how the acceptance speeches of those who received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science could be used to teach undergraduates. This article updates and expands Zahka's work, identifying some of the issues discussed by recent Nobel Laureates, classifying their speeches by topic…

The authors show how the causes of and the gains from current account imbalances can be integrated into undergraduate economics courses using the same pedagogical tools that are used to explain comparative advantage and the gains from trade. A nonzero current account provides a mechanism for intertemporal trade, and a country has a comparative…

The author discusses several issues that instructors of introductory macroeconomics courses should consider when introducing imports in the Keynesian expenditure model. The analysis suggests that the specification of the import function should partially, if not completely, be the result of a simple discussion about the spending and import…

Despite overwhelming empirical evidence of the failure of factor price equalization, most teaching of international trade theory (even at the graduate level) assumes that economies are incompletely specialized and that factor price equalization holds. The behavior of trading economies in the absence of factor price equalization is not well…

The authors developed a classroom experiment on exchange rate determination appropriate for undergraduate courses in macroeconomics and international economics. In the experiment, students represent citizens from different countries and need to obtain currency to purchase goods. By participating in an auction to buy currency, students gain a…

The authors present a classroom experiment designed to illustrate key concepts of third-degree price discrimination. By participating as buyers and sellers, students actively learn (1) how group pricing differs from uniform pricing, (2) how resale between buyers limits a seller's ability to price discriminate, and (3) how preventing price…

The authors list economic concepts and issues covered in the children's books published by Theodor Geisel and discuss his treatment of concepts that appear most often and that are treated in greater depth. Some concepts are sophisticated and taught as formal concepts only in college-level economics courses. Others are basic and used in economics…

The authors show how the transformation loci in the specific factors model (capital specificity) and the Heckscher-Ohlin-Samuelson model (capital mobility) can be rigorously derived and easily compared by using geometric techniques on the basis of Savosnick geometry. The approach shows directly that the transformation locus with capital…

For the open economy, the workhorse model in intermediate textbooks still is the Mundell-Fleming model, which basically extends the investment and savings, liquidity preference and money supply (IS-LM) model to open economy problems. The authors present a simple New Keynesian model of the open economy that introduces open economy considerations…

Immiserizing growth is a long-term phenomenon that occurs when the gain in a country's social welfare arising from economic growth is more than offset by the loss in such welfare associated with an adverse shift in the terms of trade. In one case explored many years ago by Jagdish Bhagwati, immiserizing growth occurs in a developing nation that…

Of interest to teachers of intermediate courses in international economics, this article provides a simple technique for teaching the effect of devaluation on a country's trade balance. (Author/JDH)