Usain Bolt Is No Takeru Kobayashi
…that Takeru Kobayashi started in competitive eating. The Nathan’s 4th of July hot dog eating contest is said to have started in 1916 with the winner eating 13 hot dogs…
In one of the earliest Freakonomics Radio episodes, we asked a bunch of economists with young kids how they approached child-rearing. Now the kids are old enough to talk —…
…that Takeru Kobayashi started in competitive eating. The Nathan’s 4th of July hot dog eating contest is said to have started in 1916 with the winner eating 13 hot dogs…
Turkey sex and chicken wings, selling souls and swapping organs, the power of the president and the price of wine: these are a few of our favorite things
Among O.E.C.D. nations, the U.S. has one of the highest rates of child poverty. Until recently, it looked as if Washington was about to change that. But then … Washington…
…was not father to the thought.’” The creation and application of knowledge is at the core of innovation. This knowledge need not always be new; Nathan Rosenberg and David Mowery…
(Photo: Peter Casier) A new working paper (ungated version here) by Nathan Nunn and Nancy Qian may have interesting implications for U.S. policy on humanitarian aid. We’ve blogged before about…
…tweet, Feng Chi and Nathan Yang found that geography and party lines play a part too. Yang writes of their new paper: Politicians do not react differently to past successes…
Ideas are currency. This couldn’t be more true in academia, where it’s the job of researchers to think of questions and, hopefully, find answers. Bapu talks with economists Steve Levitt…
Among O.E.C.D. nations, the U.S. has one of the highest rates of child poverty. How can that be? To find out, Stephen Dubner speaks with a Republican senator, a Democratic…
Photo: IRRI Images From a pair of Harvard economists, Alberto Alesina and Nathan Nunn, and a UCLA business school professor, Paola Giuliano, comes this working paper (Abstract here and below;…
…such, in twenty years, it should look much as it does now — except that Nathan Lane will look notably older. Q: What factors contribute to the high price of…
(Photo: @dumbstarbucks) By now, pretty much everyone has heard about how Comedy Central star Nathan Fielder opened his personal version of a Starbucks in an L.A. strip mall. Fielder’s “Dumb…
Most travelers want the cheapest flight they can find. Airlines, meanwhile, need to manage volatile fuel costs, a pricey workforce, and complex logistics. So how do they make money —…
Our cognitive health can change as we get older. So, does leaving the workforce make problems like memory loss and difficulty focusing worse? We investigate the research, and Bapu asks:…
…a form of protest. “The ideas of liberty and equality have been an irresistible force in motivating leaders like Patrick Henry, Susan B. Anthony, and Abraham Lincoln, schoolteachers like Nathan…
