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Summary The article describes an assignment that makes writing‐to‐learn feasible in high‐enrollment statistics classes. It combines the principles of structured writing with Bloom's taxonomy. The assignment helped improve related exam scores and was easy to implement and grade for instructors.

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Evidence has shown that petroleum wealth is associated with less transparency and at the same time less tax collection. In this paper, we find that the two issues are linked through the citizens’ tax evasion behavior. We develop a model to explain this link and conduct extensive empirical tests of its validity. The explanation is that officials tradeoff greater transparency to improve tax compliance against less transparency to increase gains from corruption. Oil windfalls diminish tax revenue needs, causing officials to optimize on less transparency. Seeing this, citizens optimize on a lower level of tax compliance. At equilibrium, both decline with a positive oil shock. We also study the alternative channel in which tax compliance responds to enforcement. Transparency is found to be the more robust channel. Ignoring citizens’ strategic behavior would lead to predicting suboptimal investment in state capacity for tax enforcement. Using giant oil discoveries data combined with oil price data, we develop a dynamic composite instrument and estimate the model with a dynamic panel system generalized method of moments. We find robust support for our explanation and the model's deep structure for 130+ countries and the 1980–2010 period.

The "Candy Price Index" by Hazlett and Hill (2003) introduces students to the biases of the Consumer Price Index (CPI). This paper extends their assignment to also calculate real wages, real interest rates, real and nominal Gross Domestic Product (GDP), and the GDP deflator. Thus, it is well suited to complete the sequence of classes on measuring macroeconomic activity. In addition, the assignment provides insight into the differences between the GDP deflator and the CPI that result from their equations and not the basket of goods. Thus, this activity is a worthwhile starting point to discuss the differences between the CPI and GDP deflator.