Humberto Barreto

DePauw University · Economics and Management

The distribution of household income is a central concern in economics due to its strong influence on society’s well-being and social cohesion. Yet, non-expert audiences face serious obstacles in understanding conventional measures of inequality. To effectively communicate the extent of income inequality in the United States, we have developed a no...

The distribution of household income is a central concern of modern economic policy due to its strong influence on life quality. Yet, non-expert audiences are unaware of the relationship between these two factors. To effectively communicate the effect of income inequality on the quality of life and among the strata, we have designed a novel techniq...

The economics curriculum today does not emphasize the study of population. This needs to change immediately because we are in the midst of another demographic sea change, slamming on the brakes right after a rapid acceleration during the last half of the twentieth century. Instead of glibly tossing a dependency ratio onto a slide, this article offe...

This econometrics pedagogy note points to online material that demonstrates the importance of using cluster standard errors (SEs) with data generated from complex surveys. Simulation is used to show that both classic ordinary least squares and robust SEs perform poorly in the presence of within-cluster correlated errors, while cluster SEs perform m...

This article is not the usual Excel pedagogy fare in that it does not provide an application or example taught via a spreadsheet. Instead, it briefly reviews the history of spreadsheets in the economics classroom and explores the current environment, with an emphasis on modern learning theory. The conclusion is not surprising: spreadsheets improve...

Throughout the history of economic thought, the entrepreneur a wide variety of roles. Once cast as a fundamental agent in production, distribution and growth theories, he has now surprisingly disappeared from economic theory. This volume accounts for this disappearance, exploring how and why such a fundamental explanatory variable disappeared from...

This paper focuses on econometrics pedagogy. It demonstrates the importance of including probability weights in regression analysis using data from surveys that do not use simple random samples (SRS). We use concrete, numerical examples and simulation to show how to effectively teach this difficult material to a student audience. We relax the assum...

This paper focuses on econometrics pedagogy. It demonstrates the importance of including probability weights in regression analysis using data from surveys that do not use simple random samples (SRS). We use concrete, numerical examples and simulation to show how to effectively teach this difficult material to a student audience. We relax the assum...

The Hesitant Hand is a book about the struggle between market and state control of human behavior. Medema tells a convincing story of the evolution of the management of self-interest, which has fluctuated over time from more government control to less and back again. Adam Smith's lack of confidence in government and his explanation that the invisib...

The Potential for Conflict Index (PCI) was developed to facilitate understanding and applicability of leisure, recreation, and human dimensions findings to managerial concerns. The PCI ranges from 0 (minimal potential for conflict) to 1 (maximum potential for conflict) and simultaneously describes a variable's central tendency, dispersion, and shap...

Parrondo’s paradox is analyzed via Monte Carlo simulation and Markov chains within Microsoft Excel. The properties of individual and mixed games are clearly demonstrated. The accompanying Excel workbook, Parrondo.xls, enables the reader to replicate results, verify claims, and extend the analysis in unforeseen ways.

This unique text uses Microsoft Excel® workbooks to instruct students. In addition to explaining fundamental concepts in microeconomic theory, readers acquire a great deal of sophisticated Excel skills and gain the practical mathematics needed to succeed in advanced courses. In addition to the innovative pedagogical approach, the book features expl...

It turns out that there is a bigger, better version of The big three. Skousen should be aware of it since he wrote it himself. The making of modern economics: The lives and ideas of the great thinkers (Skousen, 2001; hereafter Making of economics) is the source of The big three. The latter is essentially a condensed version of the former.

A review essay of Mark Skousen's The Big Three in Economics: Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and John Maynard Keynes. The bottom line is this: If you want Skousen's view of the history of economics, skip The Big Three and read The Making of Modern Economics.

For a book claiming that it “introduces the reader to the major concepts,” I was quite disappointed by the papers devoted to the application of economic reasoning to legal rules. No one directly defined the core of the Chicago approach. There were no quotations from Becker about the “economic way of thinking” and no mention of Posner's famous claim...

While the undergraduate History of Economic Thought course is alive and well, it will be increasingly taught by faculty who are not historians of economics. This paper provides resources - sample syllabi, information on texts, and advice on course construction - for the non-specialist. A supporting Excel workbook, HOTResources.xls contains many lin...

“The second attempt to model monopolistic competition was far more successful than the first, essentially because the second attempt introduced a formalization that had all the relevant characteristics of monopolistic competition but was still relatively easy to handle” (pp. 1–2). The story of the first revolution is that various precursors, such a...

An exact algorithm is provided for finding the least median of squares (LMS) line for a bivariate regression with no intercept term. It is shown that the popular Program for RObust reGRESSion (PROGRESS) routine will not, in general, find the LMS slope when the intercept is suppressed. A Microsoft Excel workbook that provides the code in Visual Basi...

Micro credit programs provide institutional arrangements for low-income people to transit from nonmarket to market-oriented settings. This article develops a data set of payment records to determine micro credit participants' behavior on repayment performance. The findings shed new light strongly supporting micro credit as a feasible alternative to...

This highly accessible and innovative text (and accompanying website: Www.wabash.edu/econometrics) uses Excel (R) workbooks powered by Visual Basic macros to teach the core concepts of econometrics without advanced mathematics. It enables students to run monte Carlo simulations in which they repeatedly sample from artificial data sets in order to u...

This highly accessible and innovative text with supporting web site uses Excel (R) to teach the core concepts of econometrics without advanced mathematics. It enables students to use Monte Carlo simulations in order to understand the data generating process and sampling distribution. Intelligent repetition of concrete examples effectively conveys t...

This note describes a Web site that makes use of the Comparative Statics Wizard add-in for Microsoft Excel to enable students to focus on economic problems involving optimality, rate of change, and equilibrium solutions.

This paper corrects a fundamental error in the literature examining the OkunÕs Law relationship between the unemployment rate and the rate of growth of output. Since OkunÕs original work, biased estimates of the Okun Coefficient on Unemployment, output gaps, and potential GNP have been reported by authors who mistakenly assume that unbiased coeffic...

This paper presents two different estimates of the output loss resulting from allocative inefficiency in the Soviet Union and the United States. Surprisingly, the evidence from our examination of nine industrial sectors during the period 1960-84 shows only small differences in measured.allocative inefficiency between the United States and Soviet ec...

1. Introduction 2. Entrepreneurial Theories in the History of Economic Thought 3. The Disappearance of the Entrepreuneur from Microeconomic Theory - A History 4. An Explanation of the Disapperance of the Entrepreneur - The Description 5. An Explanation of the Disapperance of the Entrepreneur - The Rationale 6. An Explanation of the Disappearance of...

This highly accessible and innovative text with supporting web site uses Excel (R) to teach the core concepts of econometrics without advanced mathematics. It enables students to use Monte Carlo simulations in order to understand the data generating process and sampling distribution. Intelligent repetition of concrete examples effectively conveys t...