This course explores the proper role of government in the regulation of the environment. It will help students develop the tools to estimate the costs and benefits of environmental regulations. These tools will be used to evaluate a series of current policy questions, including: Should air and water pollution regulations be tightened or loosened? What are the costs of climate change in the U.S. and abroad? Is there a “Race to the Bottom” in environmental regulation? What is “sustainable development”? How do environmental problems differ in developing countries? Are we running out of oil and other natural resources? Should we be more energy efficient? To gain real world experience, the course is scheduled to include a visit to the MIT cogeneration plant. We will also do an in-class simulation of an air pollution emissions market.

Since the CoVID19 pandemic, essential workers have been impacted beyond that of others in the labor force.  Statistics on nonmedical essential workers and how CoVid19 affects their health and livelihood are lacking. No centralized reporting exists and corporations do not either collect or provide this data. This OER attempts to bring together various sources information from March-July 2020 for future research. This material is a compilation of original sources of varying restrictions to be used for educational purposes, so I have chosen the CC BY NC ND license.

Artificial Intelligence (AI), and the algorithmic judgment at its core, is developing at breakneck speed. This version of the popular Ethics for Engineers course focuses on the ethics issues involved in the latest developments of computer science.

This is a semester-long jigsaw project in which students work in teams to explore the effects of energy resource development on local water resources, economics, and society. Students are presented with a contemporary energy resource development issue being debated in their community. They research the water, geological, economic, and social impact of the project, and then either defend or support the development proposal.

What role does economics play in your day-to-day life? You might be surprised to find that economics is a big part of nearly everything you do! Everyday Economics explores just that — how the “big ideas” from economics relate to everyday topics. The course is viewer-driven — you tell us where the course should go.

In this video, Professor Don Boudreaux of George Mason University explains how the price system is able to coordinate the behavior of billions buyers and suppliers in a great chain of global cooperation.

Context Rich Problem using the concepts of excise tax incidence, elasticity of demand, and elasticity of supply. Students must determine which information is appropriate and which is extraneous to the problem.

Students learn far more from doing than from viewing. By seeing relationships that they have developed themselves, by diagraming those relationships themselves, students learn far more than merely reading over what someone else has done. It is argued that especially for the dynamic problems encountered in environmental and resource economics, Excel has a comparative advantage as a learning aid. We develop a simple, flexible Excel assignment to illustrate the Brander and Taylor (1998) model of the Easter Island economy. Brander and Taylor argue that on Easter Island a crucial natural resource, the island's palm forest, was an open-access (res nullius) resource, leading to over harvesting and eventual societal collapse. Brander and Taylor's simple model showing the interaction of human population with a renewable resource, a forest, mimics what is known about the human population and forest from archaeological evidence.

The open access institutional protection of renewable resources is illustrated by a simple diagram of population and resource stock over centuries, a model much like ordinary predator-prey models in biology. Variations on the basic Brander and Taylor model, such as changes in propoerty rights institutions and/or changes in technology, based on published work in the literature, can be explored and compared to the original Brander and Taylor results of boom and eventual collapse.

Brander, J.A. and M.S. Taylor (1998). The simple economics of Easter Island: A Ricardo -- Malthus model of renewable resource use. American Economic Review

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This set of assignments exposes students to data which can be used to analyze economic inequality in international and historical context. Then students are asked to generate a thesis-driven argument drawing supporting evidence from one or more of the data sources.

This is a two-part activity that implements an extension of the "think-pair-share" cooperative learning technique to study the determinants of supply and demand through hypothetical and real world examples.

Ever feel as if you are paying the price for someone else's "deal"? Perhaps you are choking on the pollution from a foundry where cheap widgets are made. That spillover effect is called an externality. There are positive ones, too.

In this interactive lecture, students watch a video clip from The Colbert Report that addresses pollution externalities. Students graph the market and use the write-pair-share technique, then brainstorm ways to move the market to the socially efficient equilibrium.

The second episode of our podcast series, The Economic Lowdown, discusses the building blocks of the economy, the factors of production.

The Fair model web site includes a freely available United States macroeconomic econometric model and a multicounty econometric model. The models run on the Windows OS. Instructors can use the models to teach forecasting, run policy experiments, and evaluate historical episodes of macroeconomic behavior. The web site includes extensive documentation for both models. The simulation is for upper-division economics courses in macroeconomics or econometrics. The principle developer is Ray Fair at Yale University.

This activity teaches students how to formulate research questions and perform empirical analysis. Students analyse family budgets from late 19th-century industrial workers.

This Farmers' Agribusiness training course has been developed to help both farmers and farmer organisations. Its intention is to provide access to provide access to additional skills and knowledge that will allow farmers to move from a 'farm' to a 'firm'. This lesson provides information on what farming activities could be considered 'Enterprises' and incorporated into an Enterprise Accounting spreadsheet, how to use functions to calculate totals and averages within the spreadsheet program, customise formula using a spreadsheet program and how to customise the Enterprise accounting template.

A one-day strike by fast food workers in New York City is a teachable moment for students on the fast food industry and worker organizing. This lesson includes a brainstorm, small-group readings and discussion, and an opinion continuum activity to get students thinking about these issues.

"Father Christmas" by The Kinks is used in conjunction with Joel Waldfogel's article "The Deadweight Loss of Christmas" to examine the relative value of cash versus inkind gifts. This can then be extended to an analysis of various public policies.

Learn how monetary policy works by taking charge of a simulated economy or learn how the federal reserve influences the US economy through this boards monetary policy media center.