Barry Nalebuff and I have a new column in Forbes (“A Market Test for Credit Cards”) which criticizes some aspects of the recent credit-card legislation as being too anti-market.
I’ve been reading a truly excellent book by Joshua Angrist and Jorn-Steffen Pischke called Mostly Harmless Econometrics: An Empiricist’s Companion. It’s not written for a general audience, but if you pulled an A- or better on a college-level econometrics course (and if you love Freakonomics), then this is the book for you. It should be required reading for anyone who is trying to write an applied dissertation. It is the rare book that captures the feeling of how to go about trying to attack an empirical questio; and it does this by working through two or three dozen of the neatest empirical papers of the last decade (often coauthored by Angrist). It is also peppered with references to Douglas Adams‘s writing — so what’s not to like?
I’m toiling away this summer writing a book about commitment contracts. And out of the blue, I received an email from an aspiring economist (who is planning to apply to PhD programs this fall), named Matt Johnson, who has an interesting new wrinkle. Matt writes…
Daniel Markovits and I have a new piece in Slate arguing that sellers could use a fairly simple escrow agreement to provide buyers with price protection.
New traffic signs have appeared on the drive to my son’s school that perplex me and have me thinking of John C. Calhoon.
Just before Christmas, I reported that the CBOE‘s Volatility Index (^VIX) had fallen from “an apocalyptic 80 percent” to a merely extraordinary 45 percent.
And I said:
When it drops below 30 percent, it will be a strong indication that the market correction is complete and we’re back to business as usual.
Happily, we’re going to get a chance to see if I was right.
Akhil Amar and I just published an op-ed piece in the Los Angeles Times suggesting that President Obama might nominate two justices for the Supreme Court: Souter‘s formal letter to Obama indicates that he will step down at the end of this term — presumably late June. But nothing prevents the president from nominating now and the Senate from confirming . . .
A hidden side of Freakonomics is the extraordinary mesh of collaboration that has grown up around the movement. There is no better example of this collaboration than my colleague and good friend John Donohue, who has coauthored with Levitt (on abortion), Ayres (on guns), and Wolfers (on the death penalty). There is simply no finer quantitative empiricist in the legal . . .
Once again, Catherine Rampell has an interesting Economix post (“Minority Rules: Sex Ratios and Suffrage”) describing a new empirical analysis arguing that “jurisdictions that granted women the right to vote earlier generally had lower concentrations of women.” Why? [M]en had much to lose by enfranchising women. … The relative scarcity of women in the West may have “reduced the political . . .
In a recent post, I extolled the virtues of Robert Cialdini‘s Yes!: 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive. The book is wonderfully designed in 50 short chapters to describe the results of 50 different randomized field experiments. The format of, say, 1,800 words per chapter is a bit unusual. But I found it a great way to catch up . . .
AOL Autos has a great article on new technologies that shut off your engine if you fail to make payments on your car loan. The devices, which are required by a growing number of subprime loan contracts, are the product of a revolution in telematics — the blending of telecommunications and wireless technology. The devices are usually controlled remotely by . . .
Catherine Rampell had a nice post last week over at Economix (“Do It Or Pay”) telling of NPR’s recent interview with Peter Orszag, the director of the White House’s Office of Management and Budget, in which Orszag talks about writing an exercise contract exactly like what my beloved stickK.com offers:
In my last post, I argued that (the truly excellent show) Friday Night Lights might unwittingly be exacerbating the mistaken idea that the vast majority of high-schoolers have sex. I worried that this discrepancy between what adolescents believe (virgins are rare) and the truth (high-school virgins are the norm) is a dangerous combination. Here’s why I’m concerned (and what it . . .
I’m a huge fan of Friday Night Lights — to the point that when a student makes an especially good point in class, I sometimes intone “Clear eyes, full heart,” emulating the coach in the series. But it was with some sadness that I watched a couple weeks ago an episode in which Julie, the coach’s daughter, lost her virginity . . .
John Dunn/The New York Times Courtney Paris Oklahoma’s loss in the N.C.A.A. tournament raises interesting questions of both economics and law. The Sooners’s star player, Courtney Paris, promised before the tournament to pay back her scholarship if the Sooners didn’t win the championship. As an economist, I can’t wait to find out whether Paris will follow through (and if so, . . .
My family is somewhat obsessed with all things Sarah Dooley. We were first won over by her oddly moving songs. Check out this love song, “Watching Goonies at My House.” But she is also writing and staring in her own comedies. As an undergraduate at Barnard College, she has started posting to YouTube a series of short And Sarah films . . .
Here’s a post I coauthored with Peter Siegelman (an economist who teaches at University of Connecticut law school) who is one of my earliest and most frequent coauthors (see, for example, here and here). Screenshot from YouTube.com. By now, virtually everyone in the country has heard that the Peanut Corporation of America knowingly shipped peanut products contaminated with salmonella bacteria, . . .
When Bernie Madoff turned himself in, his firm owed investors $65 billion, but had only about a billion dollars on hand. Never before have we seen anything close to a $64 billion fraud. But in an important sense, the unprecedented vastness of Bernie Madoff’s fraud is a good thing. “If I hadn’t invested in Madoff, I would have ended up . . .
Last fall, I spoke at an SPSS conference in Las Vegas. As I was heading home, I saw a sign on a convenience store (right next to Bally’s) that made me do a double-take. I got so interested that after a couple of blocks, I convinced my driver to turn around and let me go back to take these pictures: . . .
Like Greg Mankiw, I think it’s a no-brainer that we should raise the gas tax. But it’s incredibly difficult to muster the political will to impose a traditional tax. (Witness California’s inability to increase the state gas tax by a measly 12 cents.) Last year, Robert Samuelson (and a host of others) proposed a contingent tax that only kicks in . . .
My favorite Obama quotation is not one of his most poetic: My mother [would] … wake me up at 4:30 in the morning, and we’d sit there and go through my lessons. And I used to complain and grumble. And she’d say, “Well this is no picnic for me either, buster.” He had me at “buster.” I love these words . . .
Photo: flavouz Here’s a bleg asking what happened the last time you ordered a Happy Meal at McDonald’s. I’m particularly interested in whether you were asked a toy question and how it was framed. Here in Connecticut, when I drive through, I’m sometimes asked whether the toy is for a boy or a girl. Sometimes they ask “Do you want . . .
A business exec told me that he thinks of consulting firms a bit like Charlie Sheen thinks about prostitutes. When I asked him to explain, he said that when Sheen was being sentenced for using a prostitute, the judge asked him why a man like him would have to pay for sex. And Sheen reportedly replied: “I don’t pay them . . .
Here’s a post with my co-author and colleague at Yale Law School, Jonathan Macey. Jon is the author of the just-published book Corporate Governance: Promises Kept, Promises Broken. Airlines and Opting Ethics By Ian Ayres and Jonathan Macey Some airlines and travel sites are trying to goose their revenues by running a new opt-out insurance scam. As Tribune Media Services . . .
John Donohue and I have weighed in again on the concealed-handgun debate. (You can read previous writings on this subject here, here, and here.) This time we have responded to an empirical article by Carlisle Moody and Thomas Marvell, who claim they are “confident” that “the evidence, such as it is, seems to support the hypothesis that the shall-issue law . . .
Last November, I had the chance to go to Dubai for the first time to participate in the World Economic Forum Summit on the Global Agenda. Peter Ubel One of the most interesting people I met there was Peter Ubel, a practicing physician who is also trained in the ways of behavioral economics and psychology (here’s Peter’s Huffington Post write-up . . .
My kids’ schools never stopped class to listen to President Bush‘s inauguration speech; but my sense in Connecticut is that many public and private schools stopped normally scheduled classes to listen to Obama‘s inauguration speech. News articles suggested that many schools considered his inauguration address a teachable moment. The empiricist in me wonders whether this phenomenon is more pronounced in . . .
One of the coolest things about posting at Freakonomics is the chance to be educated by your high-quality comments, which add to our posts and sometimes correct our mistakes. But to be honest, every once in a while I have been depressed by the harsh general tone of criticism. (For example, the comments here got me down. To be specific, . . .
As I was getting coffee in the faculty lounge, I started talking to a senior colleague who is nearing retirement. He said that he avoided a lot of the market pain of the last year because he had only about 25 percent of his savings in stock. (Now with the market drop, he has an even smaller percentage!) But his . . .
One of the most important but underreported financial indicators is the CBOE‘s Volatility Index (^VIX), which measures the market’s expectation of future volatility in stock prices. (The CBOE has written a nice technical white paper describing how it is calculated, here.) Traditionally, the annualized volatility of the S&P 500 has been 20 percent, but last month when I went to . . .
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