Preliminary Do not quote A Comparison of Online and Face-to-face Learning in Undergraduate Finance and Economic Policy Courses

This paper addresses some of the questions about the effects of technology on student learning. Using data from students enrolled in a Canadian business school during the 2005 summer term, we compare the performance of online and face-to-face students in two different undergraduate courses: Economic Problems and Policy Analysis and Basic Corporate Finance. When controlling for a potential selection bias and other variables that may have an effect on students ' performance, we find that online students perform better than face-to-face students in economics, while there is no such differences in finance. This is in sharp contrast with previous studies (Brown and Liedholm, 2002, Anstine, J. and Skidmore, 2005, and Coates, et. al., 2004) which showed that online students perform significantly worse than live students. As in other studies, we find that cumulative average has a positive effect on the results in both economics and finance, and that women have significantly lower results in economics than men. 1