Weather Or Not

Our latest column in the N.Y. Times Magazine is about the weather. Exciting, huh? Specifically, it’s about how some economists are studying the weather itself (particularly the potential impact of global warming) and how others use weather as an instrumental variable to measure various human behaviors, including crime, war, rioting, etc. This column is more of a review of the literature than most of our previous columns. But the literature in this case was so diverse and interesting that it seemed well worthwhile. Comments welcome below. And, as always, we’ve posted the underlying academic research elsewhere on this site.