It has become fashionable to believe that energy and oil demand respond asymmetrically to price increases and decreases. Unfortunately, the asymmetric price model utilized by Gately and others has the unintended by-product of producing intercept shifts in the demand function purely in response to price volatility. Thus what is in fact energy saving technical change is attributed to price asymmetry. The two become observationally equivalent. Furthermore, the asymmetric price model has the peculiarity of being dependent on the starting point of the data period so that parameter estimates are not robust across different sample periods. We demonstrate empirically using a panel of OECD countries for oil and energy demand that symmetric price responses cannot be rejected after explicitly controlling for energy saving technical change within a fixed effects model.

In this paper, we find a 'reverse%rsquo; weekend effect - whereby returns for Monday are positive and significantly greater than returns for the preceding Friday - in recent data for major stock indexes. We also find that, while a weak weekend effect exists in portfolios of smaller firms, the effect begins to diminish and weak 'reverse' weekend effect begins to appear in medium size firms. The 'reverse' weekend effect becomes strong and statistically significant in portfolios of large firms. The detection of a 'reverse' weekend effect in portfolios of large firms is a new finding in the literature. Copyright Blackwell Publishers Ltd 2000.

"The impact of classroom experiments on student performance, attitudes towards economics, and retention is examined. Experiments increase cognitive gains overall but may be more helpful in teaching some topics than others. The size of the impact varies with preferred learning style. Multimodal and kinesthetic learners are significantly affected, while read-write learners fare just as well with the traditional lecture/discussion format. Attitudes towards economics and retention of economic knowledge are also improved by classroom experiments. The results indicate that the costs of implementing experiments in the classroom may very well be offset by the benefits to students." ("JEL" A22, C90) Copyright 2006 Western Economic Association International.

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In this paper, we examine whether the 'reverse' weekend effect recently documented by Brusa, Liu and Schulman (2000) is concentrated in a few industries or widely spread across all the industries. The findings in this paper indicate that the 'reverse' weekend effect exists not only in "broad" indices, but also in most "industries". The results suggest that the 'reverse' weekend effect may be driven by economic events that affect "all" industries, rather than "industry-specific factors". Although the patterns of Monday returns are "similar" between "broad" indices and "industry" indices, they are "different" between the "pre"- and the "post"-1988 periods. Monday returns tend to be "negative" in the "pre"-1988 period, but tend to be "positive" in the "post"-1988 period, for both broad market indices and industry indices. These conclusions are valid even after considering the influence of the "month-of-the-year" and the "week-of-the-month" effects. Copyright Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 2003.