Five New Papers
August 5, 2026
After being heads down working for the past two years, I’ve just realized we’ve published five papers in this time! All of them are on our publications page.
As time goes by: Long-term retention of economics skills came out in PLOS ONE in December. This is the first paper to come out of our skills retention project, and it asks a question the literature has mostly ignored: what do students still know once the course is over? In this NSF-funded work, we followed and tested students who took introductory or intermediate microeconomics courses one to two and a half years after their courses had ended. Demographic characteristics and prior preparation turn out to be strong predictors of how much students retain, while their initial attitudes toward economics are not. We also find evidence that using economic skills in later jobs and courses helps students hold onto them.
Improving Introductory Microeconomics Outcomes through Concurrent Support Courses appeared in AEA Papers and Proceedings in May, and it is the first paper to come out of our math skills project. We evaluated two one-credit courses running alongside a large introductory microeconomics course. The one that concentrated on core math skills early in the semester improved performance on both the math and the microeconomics assessments. The one built around guided problem-solving improved only microeconomics understanding.
Measuring academic mindset in economics courses is out in the International Review of Economics Education, and it is the first big result from the Academic Mindset Study — 3,212 students, 45 courses, 35 instructors, 24 institutions, and 26 coauthors. Students who do not identify as male and first-generation college students start their courses with lower academic mindset scores, and those gaps are wider in introductory courses than in upper-level ones. That matters for anyone thinking about where to aim an intervention.
International insights into the academic mindset of economics students takes the same questions outside the United States, drawing on EENE surveys of 1,188 students at 11 universities across eight countries. Mindset turns out to be dynamic rather than steadily improving: students’ sense of belonging and of the discipline’s relevance rose over a term, while general self-efficacy and beliefs about the accessibility of economics fell. Non-male students reported lower self-efficacy and weaker perceived relevance, and several of those gaps were still there at the end of term. Carlos Cortinhas and Jana Sadeh led this one, which is due out in the December issue of IREE.
Enabling collaborative research at scale in the Journal of Economic Education describes EENE, the Economic Education Network for Experiments. Most of what we know about teaching economics comes from studies run at one institution by one or two instructors, which leaves us with imprecise estimates that may not generalize. EENE develops and implements multi-site experiments that address both problems.
