Search results

Commentators have claimed that business schools encourage unethical behavior by using economic theory as a basis for education. We examine claims that exposure to agency theory acts as a self-fulfilling prophecy, reducing ethical behavior among business students. We experimentally test whether economics coursework or a manipulated competitive vs. cooperative frame affects measured ethical behavior in simulated decision settings. We measure ethical behavior using established tasks. We also measure ethical recognition to test whether agency theory reduces recognition of ethical issues. Exposure to agency theory in either prior classwork or the experiment increased wealth-increasing unethical behavior. We found no effect on unethical behavior that does not affect wealth. We found no effect of exposure to agency theory on ethical recognition. Usual laboratory experiment limitations apply. Future research can examine why agency theory reduces ethical behavior. Educators ought to consider unintended consequences of the language and assumptions of theories that underlie education. Students may assume descriptions of how people behave as prescriptions for how people ought to behave. This study contributes to the literature on economic education and ethics. We found no prior experimental studies of the effect of economics education on ethical behavior.

With the continuous development and penetration of the Internet, there have been vast amounts of changes to the traditional method of classroom teaching. The massive open online course (MOOC) shows a significant combination of network information technology and educational resources. However, in order to make up for the disadvantages which occur when making transition from classroom to online learning such as ‘large-scale’ and ‘no feedback’, the Online-to-Offline (O2O) mode was created and developed. Using the course of ‘microeconomics’ taught by Chinese university professors as a reference, this chapter aims at explaining the course design and innovation which is a modification of the outcomes-based education (OBE) theory, the introduction of O2O teaching reform and application. The process is carried out by firstly setting the expected learning goal of this course on the basis of the OBE educational goal of the university, college and the major; secondly, designing this course with ‘online 311 class’ and ‘offline 271 course’; thirdly, implementing the O2O teaching model; and lastly, evaluating the teaching result in order to provide some enlightenment for the tryout of ‘MOOC+O2O’ and OBE theory under the Internet background.

A discipline is bound by some combination of a shared subject matter, shared theory, and shared technique. Yet modern economics is seemingly without limit to its domain. As a discipline without a shared subject matter, what is the binding force of economics today? The authors combine topic modeling and text analysis to analyze different approaches to inquiry within the discipline of economics. The authors find that the importance of theory has declined as economics has increasingly become defined by its empirical techniques. The authors question whether this trajectory is stable in the long run as the binding force of the discipline.

The present essay re-examines the scope of Sraffa’s critique of Marshall’s supply curves that the former developed in his 1925 and 1926 articles showing that neoclassical supply curves derived from non-proportional returns are not robust both in the short and in the long run. After examining what a short-run and a long-run equilibrium means both for the original Sraffa’s articles and for Marshall’s pioneer contribution, the chapter discusses the common procedure in conventional economics to introduce the limitations to the growth of the firm. The argument of the chapter will be based on the 1920s articles as well as on the ‘Lectures on Advanced Theory of Value’ delivered in 1928–1931 by Sraffa at Cambridge University, now publicly available online by the Wren library, Trinity College, Cambridge. For short-run analysis, it must be assumed that the number of firms is fixed. This assumption entails serious problems with regards to the notions of competition and competitive behaviour. For long-run analysis, the sources of increasing costs are problems of management and control. However, this idea is untenable both on logical and empirical grounds. We argue that contemporary mainstream microeconomic treatment of costs and supply in the context of perfect competition still presents several problems. These problems, rather than being superficial, lie at the root of the supply and demand approach of value and distribution.

This study takes advantage of abundant data from the Economics Department at National Tsing Hua University to empirically evaluate whether there exist academic performance differentials between undergraduate students from two entrance channels (exam-based and application-based methods) across courses and grades. We first evaluate the academic performance between the students based on two entrance channels, and then incorporate the General Scholastic Ability Test (GSAT) score (including five subjects of Chinese Literature, Mathematics, English, Science, and Society) into the independent variables to control for the students' ability. Our empirical results exhibit the students recruited through the application-based method outperform those admitted from the exam-based method in required courses after controlling for the students' individual characteristics. Nevertheless, we found that the advantage disappears for the elective courses. Furthermore, the academic gaps between the two groups of students tend to decline or disappear when students are seniors. The findings indicate that entrance exam scores (e.g., the Scholastic Assessment Test (SAT) scores in the United States) are good indicators for predict college academic performance, making the potential function of entrance exam in Taiwan relatively comparable to that in the United States. The findings also detail that individual GSAT scores on English, Math, and Society are positively and significantly associated with his/her performance on the core courses in Economics, supporting a significant learning progression from the curricula of senior high school to the undergraduate college education.

A growing academic literature seeks to define corporate environmental management (CEM) and understand its implications for corporate behavior and environmental outcomes. However, the research questions are of more than just academic interest, as the answers have immediate consequences for business strategy, environmental quality, and the relationship between CEM and public policy. How does CEM differ from more general notions of corporate management? Are there incentives for CEM that go beyond improving the bottom line? Does CEM produce genuine improvements in environmental performance, or is it simply a public relations form of “green-washing”? To what extent, if any, does CEM serve as a complement or substitute for more centralized forms of environmental policy? Questions such as these are the focus of theoretical and applied research in a variety of disciplines, including, but not limited to, economics, sociology, psychology, political science, management, and industrial ecology.

For long now the economics profession has boasted of Economics as the Queen of the Social Sciences. That was the era when Economics matured under the shade of a classical notion of the physical universe, whose properties it imported into rational choice. Economics emulated the mathematical methods of optimization and equilibrium behavior and overarched these methods between microeconomics and macroeconomics in the areas of economic growth, public choice theory, rational expectations, constitutional economics, and many others. Each of these branches of economics remained entrenched in rational choice behavior exported from the microlevel to institutional and collective norms. In this way, a unique and universal premise of self-interest, individualism and independence, and completeness of rational choice assumptions was extended to the institutional level. Thus, the rational choice behavior of individualism became the principle of methodological individualism of liberal institutionalism.