Itzhak Ben-David is a Ph.D. candidate in finance at the University of Chicago’s Graduate School of Business. (Levitt is one of his dissertation advisors.) While pursuing his original research idea — the degree to which housing prices efficiently incorporate anticipated tax increases — Ben-David stumbled upon a slightly juicier topic: a real-estate sleight of hand known as the “cashback transaction,” . . .
From Reuters, via the New Zealand Herald: Contrary to the notion that American tourists are obnoxious, a survey of 15,000 European hoteliers found that Americans ranked second, behind the Japanese, as the world’s politest and most preferable guests. This may have to do, of course, with our great fondness for tipping. Britons, meanwhile, were rated the fifth worst tourists, due . . .
We ran Part 1 of our Q&A with Mark Cuban yesterday; here is Part 2. Thanks again to all of you for the good questions and to Mark for the great answers. Q: I loved your early bet on HD entertainment – it was spot-on. What industries do you see on the horizon that offer similarly explosive potential? A: If . . .
It might surprise you to learn that more members of the Freakonomics Fan Club hail from New Jersey than any other state. Well, actually, all of the Freakonomics Fan Club members are from New Jersey. All two of them. Except for my mother, Janice and Carole Szelich (president and co-president of the fan club) are the most loyal fans we . . .
June 8 is Lindisfarne Day, commemorating the 793 C.E. Viking raid of the Isle of Lindisfarne,?as well as National Jelly-Filled Donut Day?(not to be confused with last week’s National Doughnut Day).
We’ve got a column appearing in the June 10 issue of the New York Times Magazine, which is a special issue on the U.S. wealth divide. Our piece deals with some interesting new research on real-estate sales (more on this later today). I know what you’re thinking: more Realtor bashing! Well, no. Even though we’ve written various things about the . . .
This week marks the launch of Covestor, an online investor service that allows other “covestors” to assess and even mimic your investment style. (Hat tip: Matthew Hertz.) Reader Elizabeth Gonzalez alerted us to an interesting consumer trend: high-end furniture and fashion accessories made from recycled trash. Here’s an example. Because nothing says “green” like a purse made from old Firestones. . . .
My guess is that Mark Cuban doesn’t sleep very much. In addition to his various entrepreneurial activities, including an attempt to start up a new pro football league, he also managed to respond to a great many of the questions you all posed on our superfreako user-generated Q&A. (The only thing missing is a question about who he wants to . . .
Richard Brodie, a poker player best known as the original author of Microsoft Word, had a string of obscenely good luck on some video poker machines at Caesars Palace — and then, Brodie writes, he was asked by Caesars parent company Harrah’s to never again darken the door of any Harrah’s property. Yikes. Brodie is obviously much more of a . . .
June 7 is National Chocolate Ice Cream Day – doubly appropriate given that June is also National Dairy Month.
This week’s New York Magazine breaks down how money is made by all kinds of New York City individuals and businesses from a yellow-cab driver to sex shops to financial firms. Levitt gets a hat tip in the “Drug Dealer” write-up. A CDC study finds that violence costs the U.S. more than $70 billion per year, as much as the . . .
There are not many strong incentives for individuals to provide great customer service. There may be small financial rewards that accrue if customers routinely tell an employee’s supervisor what a great job they did; but if someone owns the business, the rewards are greater because positive word of mouth will generate new customers. Not surprisingly, many reports of great customer . . .
The introduction of new pay-by-weight trash charges in Ireland seems to have produced a strange and troubling effect: an increase in burn victims at St. James Hospital in Dublin. Huh? The theory is that people wanted to avoid having to pay for all their trash so instead they burned it in their backyards. Gary Finnegan, editor of Irish Medical News, . . .
Before reading further, take a guess at what the five most popular baby names for boys were last year in the U.K. If you can guess No. 2, you are bloody brilliant. If you are like me and not so bloody brilliant, you can find the answer here. (Hat tip to Matt Hawke.)
In addition to being the anniversary of D-Day,?June 6 is National Yo-Yo Day, in honor of the birthday of yo-yo entrepreneur and trademark holder Donald Duncan Sr. (FWIW, it’s rumored that a Freakonomics yo-yo is currently in production.)
Last week was a busy one for the visual wizards at Google. First, the company launched Street View, which offers street-level photos of San Francisco, New York, Miami, Denver, and Las Vegas; the remarkable new service promptly drew controversy as bloggers and surprised photo subjects raised privacy concerns. Then came word that the alleged JFK bombing suspects had used images . . .
Just in time for tonight’s GOP debates, Michael Scherer at Salon offers a closer look at the growing GOP shake-up caused by presidential candidate Ron Paul, whom we’ve blogged about before. News from the International Journal of Hospitality Management: Diners will spend more money in your restaurant if it is scented with lavender. The bad news, as pointed out by . . .
On the InTrade prediction market site, John Edwards has fallen behind the undeclared Al Gore. Here is Edwards’s recent price chart: And here is Gore’s: Note how far Gore has fallen since the Oscar hubbub. Note, also, that Gore remains (fairly) adamant that he won’t run. On the GOP side, meanwhile, the not-quite-yet-declared Fred Thompson has just about caught up . . .
Gene Weingarten of the Washington Post has a funny take on the notion of outsourced journalism, taking off on a real story — about Indian journalists covering town meetings in Pasadena — that we blogged about here. You may recall that Weingarten is the same journalist who wrote the fantastic piece about world-class violinist Joshua Bell‘s undercover concert in a . . .
There’s an incredibly interesting Q&A in today’s Wall Street Journal with Arthur D. Levinson, the CEO of biotech pioneer Genentech, mostly concerning the topic of the company’s cancer drugs. (There is a lot of interesting cancer news in the papers these days, mainly because of the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology in Chicago.) Levinson regularly deals . . .
June 5 is a virtual smorgasbord of holidays, including Hunger Awareness Day and World Environment Day as well as Saint Boniface Day and, of course, National Gingerbread Day (but you already knew that). Perhaps the proper celebration involves eating gingerbread on an empty stomach while taking an outdoor stroll past St. Boniface Church in San Francisco.
Looks like all that time spent on MySpace could start earning you college credits. Via Andrew Lavallee at the Wall Street Journal: More and more universities are incorporating curricula on social computing, allowing students to study subjects like online communities, social networking and user-contributed content as part of graduate and undergrad programs. This month in Scientific American, Cornell economics professor . . .
I have a favorite thought exercise, especially when thinking about the sort of complex, dynamic systems that are interesting but difficult to write about: the health-care system, e.g., or education, politics, energy consumption, finance, cancer research, etc. One natural way to approach such systems is to take note of what inputs and outputs already exist and then, isolating them, try . . .
A reader named Jeff Stier wrote to inform us of the upcoming Angels in Waiting Third Annual Blood Drive in Memory of Joel Kirshner, for which Stier is the project director. Last year, the event was the largest mobile blood drive in the history of the New York Blood Center. For the past two years, the organizers have offered donors . . .
If you happen to live near Minneapolis, or are passing through in the vicinity of June 18, please stop in and hear me give a lunchtime Freakonomics lecture. I will be warming up for this fellow. Perhaps this time I will have a chance to ask him some of your questions. I am not sure why he gets such bigger . . .
True to our word, we’re continuing the tradition of noting our nation’s bottomless appetite for holidays, official or otherwise. And so: Happy Monday, June 4, also known as Old Maid’s Day. A little background on the holiday’s origin, via FierceWomen.com: According to Holiday Insights this is the day to “put into the spotlight all of the fair maidens who have . . .
I am an editor at one of the top academic economic journals, the Journal of Political Economy. I handle between 150 and 200 manuscripts a year, deciding whether or not the journal should publish each of them. It takes a lot of time — something I’ve been short on lately. I’ve turned into a lousy journal editor as a consequence. . . .
Once upon a time, my friend and co-author Steve Levitt was known as the most outstanding American economist under 40. I have it on good authority that this is no longer true. On May 29, Levitt turned 40. His greatest birthday fear was that someone would throw him a party. He is fiercely anti-party, especially when the party is his. . . .
Now it’s been revealed that the reality show we blogged about the other day was a hoax designed to call attention to the shortage of donated organs. The contestants who needed kidneys really do need kidneys, but the “donor” was an actress. “We have only done this cry for help because we want to solve a problem that shouldn’t be . . .
Nicolas Gueguen, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Bretagne-Sud, performed a study in which his male research assistants approached 240 women in the street and asked for their phone numbers. Half of the women were asked the question accompanied by a light touch on the arm; the other half received no physical contact. Of those touched, 19% . . .