One Little Girl Who Will Never Ask for Another Play Date at the Levitts’
One of my daughters recently had a second-grade friend of hers over to the house for a play date. My wife, Jeannette, was down on the first floor, while the…
One of my daughters recently had a second-grade friend of hers over to the house for a play date. My wife, Jeannette, was down on the first floor, while the…
Here’s the latest guest post from Yale economist and law professor Ian Ayres. Here are Ayres’s past posts and here is a recent discussion of standardized tests. A recent article…
… just one of the choice quotes delivered by my father in this informative article about his life’s work….
The top 10 science and technology stories of 2007. Can scientists replace sleep with a drug? The key to raising gifted kids: don’t tell them they’re gifted. (Earlier) Libraries see…
…medical elements from trans fats to toxins in cleaning products. But what about economics? Can fertility rates be linked to financial incentives (or disincentives) to have children? Economists Alma Cohen,…
Gold farming to hit the big screen (Earlier) Islamic hedge funds on the rise Do we know what our kids are doing online? Recession upon us? Mac & cheese sales…
…According to this Economist article on their research, Nagel and Malmendier found that “people’s eventual appetite for risk is affected by the economic environment during their childhood, well before financial…
A while back, I wrote about the Game Theorist blog, in which my friend Joshua Gans writes about his adventures as an economist-parent (or equally, as a parent-economist). Each role…
I’m reading a biography about Buckminster Fuller written by Lloyd Steven Sieden. Fuller had a 4-year-old daughter Alexandra who caught the 1918 flu, later got meningitis, and finally was afflicted…
dno1967 An exceptionally neat new working paper points out that parents’ time spent with kids has increased hugely since the early 1990’s, particularly among highly educated parents. This is a…
If you own a Nook, the new e-reader from Barnes & Noble — and apparently quite a few of you do — you can bring a little Freakonomics to your…
Gary Becker and Richard Posner debate a timeless question: Will the next generation be better off than their parents’ generation? Becker’s take: “America has always been optimistic about its future….
Tamara Audi and Arlene Chang of the Wall Street Journal dissect the global baby industry, which is growing thanks to increasingly restrictive international adoption laws. “Prospective parents put off by…
A reader named Clark Case, who lives in Aurora, Ohio, and works as a product manager, writes in with a child-rearing observation. His kids are 7 and 4; his wife…
Busy fathers, pay attention: a?new study finds that if your kids think you’re not spending enough time with them, they’re more likely to exhibit bullying behavior at school. C. Andre…
Does bribing kids work? The debate rages on, although Levitt has done it effectively on at least one occasion. A new study (summarized by the BPS Research Digest) suggests that…
In the chapter of Freakonomics called “What Makes a Perfect Parent?”, we analyze the data from the U.S. Dept. of Education’s Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, and argue that many things…
(Comstock) Bryan Caplan’s new book, Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids, (which he blogged about for us here and here) has people talking about happiness and kids, again. Over at…
Photo: surlygirl A social norm in Italy appears to be grandparents spending the day taking care of their pre-school grandchildren. Even grandfathers can be seen pushing infants around in carriages…
(Lifesize) A short paper published this week by NBER from authors Albert N. Link and Christopher J. Ruhm takes a simple but oft-neglected look into patents and creativity; namely, how…
(iStockphoto) A new study (PDF here) by University of Notre Dame economist Kasey Buckles and graduate student Elizabeth Munnich finds that siblings spaced more than two years apart have higher…
(Photo: FHKE) These days, I read a lot of books on an iPad 2 using the Kindle app. It is for the most part a very good experience, especially for…
(Photo: John Walker) We’ve blogged and podcasted about the value (or lack thereof?) of a college education. A new paper (summarized here) by sociologist Laura Hamilton suggests one way parents…
A working paper (abstract; PDF) from economists Michael Baker and Kevin Milligan advances another possible explanation for the lagging academic performance of boys — preschool boys, at least. Here’s the…
…new working paper (PDF; abstract) by economists Jason M. Lindo, Jessamyn Schaller, and Benjamin Hansen “addresses this seeming contradiction.” Here’s the abstract, with a key finding in bold: Using county-level…
A reader from Wadsworth, Ohio, named Tom Morris writes with an idea. He is a lawyer and, he says, and an “occasional acting judge in a small town”: In my…
Our most recent podcast was called “Would a Big Bucket of Cash Really Change Your Life?” It showed that the winners of a 19th-century land lottery did not appear to…
John List and Uri Gneezy have appeared on our blog many times. This guest post is part a series adapted from their new book The Why Axis: Hidden Motives and…
(Photo: rafael-castillo) A new working paper (abstract; PDF) by James Heckman and Tim Kautz looks at the relationship between “character” and student achievement as measured by test scores. Long story…
…Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything (William Morrow, $25.95), the best-selling book in which University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt takes a look at the hidden…