Category Frances Woolley
Designing exam questions: the realism-clarity trade-off
Which is the better exam question:
The impact of tax cuts on government revenues
An average person, asked to explain the impact of cutting taxes, might well reason: I have represented this argument in flow chart form to give it a spurious air of logical coherence. Yet any flow chart is only as good as the reasoning that underlies it. In this case, that reasoning is seriously incomplete.
A survey about rubrics
I use rubrics sometimes, and I'm curious to know if other people do as well, and how they feel about them, so here is a survey about rubrics: Rubric Survey I've put a couple of demographic questions on towards the end, but please feel free to skip them. Update: preliminary results over the fold.
Where has all the research gone?
I would like to write something for Economy Lab on how difficult it has become to find older Government of Canada publications.
How to answer “true, false, uncertain” questions
True, false, uncertain: "Natural gas price controls during the late 1970s hurt producers at the expense of consumers, but did improve economic efficiency." (Source) True, false, uncertain: "Assuming that the Ricardian Equivalence proposition holds in small open economy (SOE), a temporary tax cut will have no effects on the current account." (Source) From first year […]
Quantitative Time Travellers
The price of gas relative to the price of milk has been trending upwards for the past 40 years:
The case for taxing basic groceries
Economists frequently argue that taxing basic groceries is a good idea – for example, see these papers/posts making the case for taxing food in the US, Canada, and New Zealand.
Should Canadian professors be paid in US dollars?
A recent study claims that Canadian university professors are – as the Toronto Star put it – "the best-paid in the world". The media reports should be interpreted with caution. The study is restricted to professors at public universities, hence excludes the highest earning academics in the US and, possibly, other countries. "The world" turns out […]
Do economics majors need to learn Excel?
My first job after finishing my undergraduate degree in economics involved using Lotus 1-2-3 – the first "killer app" spreadsheet program – to create graphs. I'd never been taught to use a spreadsheet, but I worked it out. Fast forward a couple of decades. Spreadsheets are ubiquitious in the workplace. When a new research assistant […]
A river keeper’s story
There is a canoe put-in on the Rideau River known as "Thomson's Landing." It is marked by a six foot high stake, against which Mr Harry Thomson (for whom the put-in is named) tracked the height of the Rideau River's spring flood for almost 50 years.
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
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