Roger Barber Butters

In this study, the authors report on the revision of the Test of Economic Literacy for the fourth edition. The Test of Economic Literacy is a nationally-normed and standardized measure of the economic understanding of U.S. high school students. The economic content of the test is based on the Voluntary National Content Standards in Economics, which is used to establish the content validity for the test. The revision process is described and evidence on the test reliability and construct validity is presented from the test score analysis. The Test of Economic Literacy has a long and successful history of use by educators and researchers interested in economic education in high schools. The new edition should provide an improved instrument to continue that testing and research work.

Many states are adopting economic education standards for the K-12 curriculum, mandating economic education courses in rural and urban schools. We examine economic education outcomes for rural and urban students using test scores gathered during a national high school academic competition and by estimating a production function for economic education. We find only limited differences between the education production function in urban and rural settings and lower average scores for rural students. To close this gap, results suggest that rural schools should place economic content in the senior-year curriculum and provide teachers with increased postgraduate training in economics.

Using a unique data set of residential housing values, we improve on previous hedonic pricing and event studies literature to estimate the amenity effects of a new religious structure on local property values. We improve on previous research by extending our analysis with a pre- and post-treatment model. Using a pre- and post-treatment model, we do not find that the religious structure that we examined influenced the value of surrounding properties in the period after its completion. The results suggest that previous research using only post-completion data may mischaracterize the amenity effects of religious structures. (JEL R3)

The term "Discouraged-Business-Major" (DBM) describes students who become discouraged with the rigorous standards of colleges of business and migrate to colleges of arts and sciences to complete a degree in economics under relaxed requirements (Salemi and Eubanks 1996). Following Salemi and Eubanks, the present authors examine a decade of demographic characteristics and ability measures for every economics and business graduate at a large Midwestern university. They find DBMs, but also note that major selection dynamics are much more complex than originally expected. Finally, they employ a multinomial logit model to estimate the marginal effects of student characteristics on major choice.

As its economy struggled during the last decade, Michigan became the only state to lose population between the 2000 and 2010 Censuses. Michigan’s problems were well known and communities in other states sought to attract residents from Michigan. This paper describes the efforts of one Nebraska community, Columbus, to recruit residents from a specific Michi-gan micropolitan area. We also develop a model of destination choice by outmigrants from Michigan micropolitan areas. We find that counties that offer amenity and real wage ad-vantages have the greatest potential to attract Michigan outmigrants, that differences in un-employment rates do not influence destination choice, and that the potential for attracting workers drops with distance.

Renewed emphasis on increasing student academic achievement highlights the importance of improving educational quality despite limited educational budgets. This paper illustrates that investing in teachers' human capital has significant returns in the classroom. Using test and survey data on the educational background of teachers, we show that teacher knowledge and training have a significant impact on student performance and classroom productivity. Specifically, formal college-level instruction, learning by doing, and explicit measures of economic understanding all play important roles. Additionally, the data show that general in-service training is an imperfect substitute for formal education in economics. These results can be used to guide educational research, instructional programming, and school reform at the state and local levels.

The recent widespread adoption of online competitions in economic education provides a unique opportunity to make frequent assessments of economic literacy in U.S. classrooms. In this survey, student responses to test items from the Test of Economic Literacy (TEL) are used to create economic concept and content area achievement benchmarks. These benchmarks provide an interim renorming of the TEL and allow the authors to gauge the status of economic understanding among high school students. The data also allow the authors to compare learning outcomes between regular and advanced economics classes. Finally, the authors find that students in advanced economics classes significantly outperform students in regular classes.

Interest is growing at the precollege level in computer testing (CT) instead of paper-and-pencil testing (PT) for subjects in the school curriculum, including economics. Before economic educators adopt CT, a better understanding of its likely effects on test-taking behavior and performance compared with PT is needed. Using two volunteer student samples of CT and PT test scores collected as part of the field testing and national norming of the Test of Economic Knowledge (Walstad, Rebeck, and Butters 2010), the present authors investigated how CT and PT affect student test responses. The authors found that eighth-and ninth-grade students perform better with CT than PT, that CT has the potential to limit item guessing, and that CT may reduce item bias from the order of item placement on a test.