John J. Siegfried

The study and improvement of economic education has been a core topic in Siegfried's research. Reviewing the research on teaching economics in (mainly U.S.) colleges written until the late 1970s with Rendigs Fels, he surveys the measurement of inputs and outputs in economics education, the impacts of human capital, the college environment and of alternative teaching methods on economics education, and the long-term effects of economic education on students. Siegfried and Fels conclude that "different students learn economics in different ways" and that thus "the best teaching strategy provides alternative learning methods directed towards the different needs of different student". They find positive impacts for computer-study-management programmes (including frequent testing and adapted assignments) and programmed learning, but are less positive about the use of self-paced instruction and computerized games in economic education, and argue that graduate students are generally as good teachers as regular faculty, but would benefit from teacher training.[11] In a survey of the scant research on male-female differences in economic education produced until 1979, Siegfried finds few differences between genders in terms of learning and understanding of economics at the elementary school level, though gaps appear to develop in high school and persist through the college years without further widening.[12] In the early 1990s, together with other economic educators such as Deirdre McCloskey, Siegfried made the case for reforming economics majors, which they suggested to consist of (i) a strong introductory sequence oriented towards application, (ii) rigorous intermediate theory courses involving economic analysis, (iii) background courses in mathematics and quantitative methods, (iv) at least five electives, and (v) a capstone experience (e.g. a thesis).[13] Moreover, in the late 1990s, Siegfried and Michael Salemi called on universities, among else, to offer economics as part of general education, to revise economics curricula to foster students' proficiency in economics (more particularly, the "Hansen proficiencies") by applying economics in the classroom, and to teach economic faculty teaching methods besides lecturing.[14] More recently, Siegfried, Allen Sanderson and Peter McHenry have criticized the quality of economic impact studies of colleges and universities, arguing that they often overestimate local returns on investment due to inadequate counterfactuals and pointing to the definitions of the "local" area and "new" expenditures, the double-counting of economic impacts, problems with local taxes and the omission of local spillovers through increased human capital as common problems in such studies.[15]

In sports economics, Siegfried has applied production theory to professional basketball in the U.S. (with Cliff Huang and Thomas Zak),[16] studied the demand for minor league baseball (with Jeff Eisenberg),[17], the economics of sports facilities and their communities (with Andrew Zimbalist),[18], and the concerns for competitive balance in sports in general and in baseball in particular (with Allen R. Sanderson).[19] Other studies, in particular in industrial organization, concern topics such as corporate taxation,[20] corporate lobbying,[21] and patterns of firm exit and entry; in the last, co-authored with Laurie Beth Evans, Siegfried finds that firm exits accelerate face to lower profits and a lower capital-intensity while entry is more frequent in profitable, high-growth industries with low requirements in terms of investment capital, with both firm exit and entry being highly correlated (possibly) due to displacement and vacuum effects.[22]