The winner of the quiz goes by the tag KZ. If I can find out more about KZ, I will post that info. KZ recognized that there do not seem to be any controls for a time trend in the paper. While the authors control for all sorts of other factors like unemployment and seasonality, I think they have left . . .
Usually our quizzes are more on the whimsical side, but here is a serious one that requires a real investment of time. Some academics (at most one out of the three is an economist) in the United Kingdom recently published a paper in a journal called Applied Economics claiming that a 1 percent increase in the price of beer in . . .
This piece in the Washington Post is one of the most interesting articles I have read in a newspaper in a long, long time. The Post arranged for Joshua Bell, a world famous violinist, to bring his $3.5 million violin to a subway stop, open up his case for donations, and see how people respond. The story even shows you . . .
Dubner worries a lot about whether people comment on our posts, which is definitely evidence that he doesn’t have enough important things to worry about. Every time I have made a post about baseball, it has unleashed a torrent of comments. So as an Easter gift to Dubner, here is my annual baseball post. I’ve been working for the last . . .
Two days ago I taught my two older daughters how to play seven card stud. That night we played a few hands before they went to bed. Last night we played a few more hands. Tonight I got home from work and one of my daughters, Amanda, was particularly eager to play poker. So eager that she had already dealt . . .
The winner of the quiz is Willy, who had the 64th guess, correctly noting that LeBron James and my wife are both studying mandarin. My wife and four kids are all studying Mandarin, in part because we have two daughters adopted from China. (I tried learning a while back, but I had no talent for it and gave up.) LeBron . . .
Nobody has even been close to giving the right answer to the quiz, so I added a clue to the original post which is directly below. If it is true that LeBron had a paper route and likes poker, then he does share that with my wife, but that is not what I had in mind.
For a Freakonomics t-shirt and a signed copy of the book: What is the most notable thing that my wife Jeannette and LeBron James have in common? The first person to guess what I have in mind wins. None of the wimpy stuff Dubner does, giving away a second prize to people who answer the question correctly, but later, giving . . .
It is a strange coincidence that Ohio State and Florida played for the national championship in both college football and basketball this year. What are the odds of something like this happening in the two premier sports? Let’s assume (1) there are 50 universities that have a shot at winning each of these national titles, (2) all 50 of these . . .
In this week’s issue of Newsweek, Jonathan Alter writes a chillingly matter-of-fact article about his battle with cancer. I had the pleasure of having brunch with Alter a year or two ago. He is as intelligent and likable in real life as he is in his writing.
Emily Oster told me just yesterday that she didn’t start thinking about missing women until she was in graduate school. Now it is revealed in the Everit St. Weekly (see page 3) that she actually began the research at age 9. Knowing she spent more than 15 years working on the project, it is easier for me to understand how . . .
A Texas State Senator has been ridiculed for his proposal to pay women $500 if they show up at an abortion clinic, elect not to have an abortion, and then give the baby up for adoption. Honestly, though, is it really such a bad idea? What if he left out the part about visiting an abortion clinic? Does it make . . .
I previously blogged about a woman who had the odd hobby of clipping newspaper articles for crimes where the perpetrator had the middle name “Wayne.” The blog News of the Weird also has reported on this phenomenon. The latest gruesome crime out of Texas doesn’t break the mold: What, neighbors at the Red Oak Place apartments wondered, was going on . . .
Yes, Freakonomics is ruining the dismal science, according to this article in the New Republic [reg. req’d]. For what it is worth, I disagree.
When Freakonomics gets published in a new language, they always send me a couple copies. I just got the Serbian version: The first thing I noticed is that it is a pretty sad looking apple/orange on the cover. The second thing I noticed is that it was written by Stiven D. Levit and Stiven Dz. Dabner. Isn’t it strange to . . .
Seeing this article about drones today reminded me of a conversation I recently had with a man I met at a conference. I would identify him by name, but I left his business card in my jacket pocket which is at home, so I won’t be able to give him direct credit until I get back home later. This gentleman . . .
I’ve blogged before about my suspicions that the ban on electronic devices on airplanes is the product of a regulator with an overactive imagination, which is an opinion that upsets a lot of blog readers, so let’s take it another direction. Everyone knows you shouldn’t use cell phones in hospitals for fear of disrupting life-save hospital equipment. Right? According to . . .
I have been on a mission to convince firms to do simple experiments that will give them feedback regarding the decisions that they make. Just as with people (as Anders Ericsson studies), firms cannot learn without feedback. It turns out, however, that it is not easy for people in companies to see the wisdom in experiments. Which is why I . . .
I went to high school with a guy named Dave Kansas. We were good friends even after I beat him out for the honor of being the worst starting point guard ever on any varsity high school basketball team. He went on to become a reporter for the Wall Street Journal. One night more than a decade ago we were . . .
Zell Miller got into trouble with the media a few days back when he made the following statement, according to the Atlanta Journal Constitution website: … former U.S. Sen. Zell Miller made a little news this week in Macon when he declared that abortion has contributed to the military’s manpower shortage, the Social Security crisis, and the flow of illegal . . .
Zell Miller got into trouble with the media a few days back when he made the following statement, according to the Atlanta Journal Constitution website: … former U.S. Sen. Zell Miller made a little news this week in Macon when he declared that abortion has contributed to the military’s manpower shortage, the Social Security crisis, and the flow of illegal . . .
A news report from thespoof.com: CHICAGO. The University of Chicago, known for its free-market approach to economics, today announced that it will select its next tenured faculty member in the “the dismal science” through a reality TV competition modelled on shows such as “Survivor” and VH1’s “The (White) Rapper Show”. “We’re a competitive bunch,” said department chair Philip Reny, “and . . .
The Chicago Tribune asked me to describe my most memorable summer camp experience. Are you kidding? There was no way in the world that I ever would have gone away to summer camp as a kid. The closest I could come up with was the following story, which my Aunt Liz will appreciate because she just taught my six year . . .
They are all speakers at the TED conference which is being held this week in Monterey, California. As I have written before, TED is perhaps the single most interesting way that a smart and curious person could spend a week. This is the first time Emily Oster, who is a Becker Fellow here at U of C, will be on . . .
There is a new TV show that pits adults against 5th graders. The adults don’t fare so well. But the adults chosen to go on the show are not randomly selected, and the 5th graders are even far less random. Illinois gives a state exam to all 7th graders. Some of the questions are on astronomy. The 7th graders didn’t . . .
If there was ever a time when it made sense for economics professors to be given tenure, that time has surely passed. The same is likely true of other university disciplines, and probably even more true for high-school and elementary school teachers. What does tenure do? It distorts people’s effort so that they face strong incentives early in their career . . .
Tim Harford, author of “The Undercover Economist” has written a thoughtful article on my friend and co-author Roland Fryer’s research into the gap between Blacks and Whites .
After Slate wrote about an economics paper alleging a link between TV and autism, I blogged my skepticism regarding the claim. I haven’t seen or heard anything since that time to change my opinion. Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal revisited that paper on autism, but also embedded the discussion into a larger question of whether economists and economic techniques should . . .
Redfin is a discount real estate brokerage in Seattle that has put together some interesting data analysis from their first year in business. Their numbers suggest that clients who use their discount brokerage firm pay a lower percent of the list price than the typical home buyer in Seattle (99.329% of the listing price with Redfin vs. 100.233% with other . . .
The Journal of Clinical Psychiatry recently published a paper on the relationship between smoking and post-traumatic stress disorder. This newspaper report on the article starts out okay:“Post-trauma mental health disturbances such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) are associated with increased smoking, either by starting to smoke or an increase of tobacco use,” write Dr Peter G Van der Velden, of . . .
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