The mathematician and author sees mathematical patterns everywhere — from DNA to fireflies to social connections….
Adam Smith famously argued that specialization is the key to prosperity. In the N.F.L., the long snapper is proof of that argument. Just in time for the Super Bowl, here’s…
…surveyed associate “traditional” names with positive character traits and non-traditional names with weak performance and bad behavior. The name Kevin has particularly negative connotations; as one teacher wrote, “Kevin is…
College tends to make people happier, healthier, and wealthier. But how?
There are a lot of factors that go into greatness, many of which are not obvious. A variety of Olympic and professional athletes tell us how they made it and…
…was serious business when I saw that both Becker and the economist Kevin Murphy had gotten hair cuts for the event, making me immediately wish I had done the same….
Read the Column » Measuring the Impact of Crack Cocaine By Roland G. Fryer, Jr., Paul S. Heaton, Steven D. Levitt, Kevin M. Murphy An Economic Analysis of a Drug-Selling…
He turned a small Hollywood talent agency into a massive sports-and-entertainment empire. In a freewheeling conversation, he explains how he did it and why it nearly killed him….
…people don’t pay attention to what people say in ads. But this one – starring Kevin Durant of the Oklahoma City Thunder – has a very interesting opening line: “Man…
Adam Smith famously argued that specialization is the key to prosperity. In the N.F.L., the long snapper is proof of that argument. Here’s everything there is to know about a…
Dollar-wise, the sports industry is surprisingly small, about the same size as the cardboard-box industry. So why does it make so much noise? Because it reflects — and often amplifies…
Justin Lahart at the Wall Street Journal suggests a new party game for economists (or at least something to keep you awake if a conference gets dull): Six Degrees of…
…If nothing else, this might be a great jobs program, since high earners would have a very strong incentive to hire lots of chauffeurs. (HT on VMT tax: Kevin Murphy)…
…Levitt response to Ted Joyce, and now in a recent paper by Roland Fryer, Paul Heaton, me, and Kevin Murphy. The key points I mentioned in Slate five years ago…
…a helmet leads to more head injuries,” David Zuby, chief research officer for the data institute and an affiliated organization, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, said. (HT: Kevin Murphy)…
…had a great collection of speakers at the event, including top academics like Nobel Laureates Gary Becker and George Akerlof, Andrei Shleifer, Kevin Murphy, Ed Lazear, and Ed Glaeser, as…
…pay not only a price in dollars, but also indirectly in terms of slightly increasing the chance of premature death. My colleague Kevin Murphy (who, like me, loves McDonald’s) has…
…If you ask the really great economic thinkers like Gary Becker or Kevin Murphy, how often I’m right when I try to apply Chicago price theory, they will simply tell…
…seriously each took Cassidy’s interviews.) Read them all, and come to your own judgments: Richard Posner Eugene Fama John Cochrane Gary Becker Jim Heckman Kevin Murphy Raghu Rajan Richard Thaler…
…Bureau of Economic Research working paper, 2003; Roland G. Fryer Jr., Paul Heaton, Steven D. Levitt, and Kevin Murphy, “The Impact of Crack Cocaine,” University of Chicago working paper, 2005….
…on drugs, written for a general audience on the Becker-Posner blog. Roland Fryer, Paul Heaton, Kevin Murphy, and I have written an academic article on the impact of crack cocaine….
Gary Becker and Kevin Murphy on the failed war on drugs. Selling beer at college football games worked out pretty well for the University of Minnesota this season: $907,000 in…
…Kevin Murphy yesterday. He made an interesting point: knowing Coke’s secret formula is probably worth almost nothing to Pepsi. Here is the logic. Let’s say that Pepsi knew Coke’s secret…
Ecologist Suzanne Simard studies the relationships between trees in a forest: they talk to each other, punish each other, and depend on each other. What can we learn from them?
When we try to improve things, our first thought is often: What can we add to make this better? But Leidy, a professor of engineering, says we tend to overlook…
From a reader named Kevin O’Toole comes a bleg that needs input from people with experience in the realms of running, races, and maybe Olympic competition. (We tussled with Olympic…
…31 Point Guard 0.324 Ty Lawson 28 Point Guard 0.193 Mike Conley 28 Point Guard 0.182 Average WP48 0.228 Joining this duo will be Kevin Durant, Kevin Love,…
…economists are clueless on this topic. There’s the late Albert Bartlett’s hugely popular videos – or Tom Murphy’s article “Exponential Economist Meets Finite Physicist.” The key issue is that exponential…
For most of us, the athletes are what make sports interesting. But if you own the team or run the league, your players are essentially very expensive migrant workers who…
