Effective College Study Skills

Construct a one-page retrieval grid that contrasts opportunity cost, transaction costs, profit incentives, globalization, institutions, and market versus planned economic systems.

Distinguish scarcity, trade-offs, and opportunity cost in short business scenarios.

Classify the explicit and implicit costs of a decision.

Explain how specialization and voluntary trade can increase consumption possibilities.

Explain how firms and entrepreneurs reduce transaction costs.

Calculate profit from revenue and cost data.

Predict how the profit incentive changes a business decision.

Distinguish subsistence entrepreneurs from transformational entrepreneurs.

Explain how regulation and access to finance can constrain transformational entrepreneurship.

Distinguish globalization of markets from globalization of production.

Determine whether a product should be standardized globally or localized for a national market.

Explain how lower trade barriers, cheaper transportation, and faster information transmission drive globalization.

Distinguish tariffs, quotas, offshoring, and trade liberalization.

Describe how GATT and the WTO reduced barriers to international exchange.

Evaluate a claim about globalization's effects on jobs and income using costs, benefits, and employment shifts.

Evaluate labor-policy proposals by considering workers' alternatives and unintended consequences.

Use the Environmental Kuznets Curve to distinguish claims about local pollution from claims about global pollution.

Use GDP per capita rather than total GDP to compare average living standards across countries.

Distinguish national poverty lines from international poverty lines.

Explain how property rights, legal systems, political stability, and other institutions influence economic outcomes.

Explain how prices communicate information and allocate scarce resources in a market economy.

Predict how a change in incentives affects household, business, or government behavior.

Classify an externality as positive or negative and identify a corresponding government response.

Explain the efficiency-equality trade-off in a redistribution policy.

Compare market and planned economies using the information problem and the incentive problem.