Kal Raustiala, a professor at UCLA Law School and the UCLA International Institute, and Chris Sprigman, a professor at the University of Virginia Law School, are experts in counterfeiting and intellectual property. They have been guest-blogging for us about copyright issues. Today, they write about the roles of “tweakers” and “pioneers” in the innovation world.
It’s shaping up to be a most interesting year on the tax front. A recent Freakonomics quorum focused on potential tax-policy mistakes that might be made this year, with so many issues up in the air. It brought up concerns about everything from expiring tax cuts to the federal deficit to the lack of clarity surrounding even this year’s tax code.
Is the Tea Party responsible for yesterday’s election results? Probably. But perhaps not in the way you were thinking.
Journalists have written thousands of pages describing the anger, fury or excitement of the Tea Party. But this isn’t how an economist would approach the question. Perhaps the single deepest idea in economics is the opportunity cost principle. And so it is worth asking: What is the opportunity cost of an active Tea Party movement? To figure this out, you need to ask, “or what?”
Efraim Benmelech, Claude Berrebi and Esteban F. Klor have already argued that a bad economy equals deadlier terrorists. Now, the three economists have turned their attention to the effects of house demolitions on terrorism.
A recent Buffalo News article discusses how the airlines are lobbying to rescind a new provision requiring commercial pilots to obtain 1,500 hours of flight training before they are certified (a Congressional response to last year’s fatal crash in Buffalo). The companies believe that this will cause pilots’ wages to rise (to pay for the increased training costs the pilots must incur), causing average total costs to increase, increasing industry prices and reducing output and profits.
If you think your multitasking skills are improving your productivity, think again. Consistent with other multitasking research, a new working paper (ungated version) by Decio Coviello, Andrea Ichino and Nicola Persico analyzes a sample of Italian judges with different caseloads and finds that “task juggling, i.e., the spreading of effort across too many active projects, decreases the performance of workers, raising the chances of low throughput, long duration of projects and exploding backlogs.”
Lately, I’ve been seeing a lot of school buses that are yellow everywhere except for the roof. I was perplexed as to why. According to this nearly 20-year-old New York Times article, the reason is that white tops are more reflective, lowering the temperature inside the bus by an average of 10 degrees during the summer. The source of that statistic is a very non-scientific sounding North Carolina pilot study.
Happy Election Day, everyone! Please don’t read this before you vote.
And then don’t read this either. It’s a paper by Lauren Cohen and Christopher Malloy, both of Harvard Business School, and it’s called “Friends in High Places.”
The first academic paper I ever published was an empirical analysis of the “midterm gap” in American politics. (I couldn’t find an ungated version, but it’s not really worth reading anyway!)
One Dunkin’ Donuts store is taking a stand against the penny.
A recent interview with the Rolling Stones reveals some of their business and wealth-protection strategies. “The whole business thing is predicated a lot on the tax laws,” said Keith Richards. “It’s why we rehearse in Canada and not in the U.S. A lot of our astute moves have been basically keeping up with tax laws, where to go, where not to put it. Whether to sit on it or not. We left England because we’d be paying 98 cents on the dollar. [This may sound like an exaggeration, but likely isn’t.] We left, and they lost out. No taxes at all. I don’t want to screw anybody out of anything, least of all the governments that I work with. We put 30% in holding until we sort it out.”
An emergency meeting of the Delaware Witches Association.
Among its many perks, there’s now evidence that E-ZPass may help save babies.
A few weeks back, I revealed myself to be the humorless, politically-correct parent that I am, complaining about the gender roles represented by Lego’s new line of Minifigures. My complaint: Of the sixteen Minifigures, the only two that were women were a Cheerleader and a Nurse. Ever the earnest parent, I hope my daughter can imagine herself creating a life beyond these stereotypical roles.
We recently solicited your questions for John Brenkus, author of The Perfection Point, a book about the limits of athletic achievements. Read on for Brenkus’s thoughts on those special swimsuits at the Beijing Olympics and the most surprising perfection point he encountered in his research. Thanks to everyone, especially John, for participating.
The music entrepreneur Derek Sivers gave a TED Talk with the provocative claim that you’re more likely to reach your goals if you keep them secret.
This is not the first time we’ve seen such call-and-response advertising from India. I am guessing this practice exists in the U.S., especially on the local-advertising front, but it is probably rarer.
Humans are social creatures, or so the psychologists tell us. But when does that social behavior start? Is it biological or cultural?
I have heard a lot of reasons for planes being delayed, but this was a new one. My Delta flight out of JFK was just about to push back from the gate when the captain made an announcement. He explained that there is a wheelchair on board every flight, and the one on this plane had had a malfunction – the handle broke, he said – which made it unusable. It didn’t seem to matter that no passengers on the flight had needed a wheelchair to board: the plane couldn’t take off, he said, until a replacement was brought on board.
Economists Mark J. Kamstra and Robert J. Shiller propose a new tool for government financing: “trills” — i.e., shares in U.S. GDP.
This year’s midterm elections promise to be a bit more eventful than usual, with predictions of seismic change in Congress and in many statehouses, most of it in a blue-to-red direction. But predictions aren’t elections; and even if the predictions hold true, what happens next?
A funny thing happened in Israel last week. The winning state lottery numbers were the same as the numbers drawn three weeks earlier.
The Texas A&M University system has embarked on a new accountability program. For every department – indeed, for every professor – revenue generated and cost incurred are calculated; and profit – the difference – is reported. Each professor is presumably supposed to have a marginal revenue product above his/her compensation.
Barack Obama may be under fire for failing to jump-start the economy, but a feature in the Harvard Business Review points out that Michelle Obama is doing her part to rejuvenate the fashion industry – at least the part of the fashion industry she likes.
As the calendar marches on, the pressure is mounting on me to produce my annual list of the top 10 quotations of the year. In addition to politics, economics, and sports, I need to consider the outstanding (or, more accurately, the most famous or most revealing) quotations of 2010 uttered by celebrities.
In Washington State, high-income residents and corporations are coming together to battle I-1098, a ballot initiative that would levy a 5 percent tax on “income above $400,000 per couple and a 9% levy on income above $1 million per couple.”
Ahh, Google. Has there ever been a company that has done me such terrific good, while asking for so little except the ability to do me terrific harm?
Dan Froomkin of the Nieman Watchdog Project interviews William K. Black about the media’s underreporting of fraud cases.
While the New York Yankees’ 2010 season came to a disappointing close, it would still appear inevitable that the team will want to re-sign Derek Jeter, their franchise shortstop. But it appears just as inevitable that his on-field performance isn’t worth nearly as much as he will likely want to be paid.
An interesting observation about the potential policy impact of “happiness economics” in this weekend’s Financial Times from the always-astute Tim Harford…