Photo: eflon A new NBER working paper by Brian Jacob, Jens Ludwig and Douglas Miller examines how improved housing conditions impact child mortality rates in Chicago. The improvement in child…
People who sleep better earn more money. Now all we have to do is teach everyone to sleep better.
…to stay in school. I think paying the kids doesn’t take advantage of the leverage of a parent over their child. Just a thought. As a child in the feudal…
Fear is a popular tool in public health campaigns. But is it an effective one? Bapu Jena discusses new research on whether we can — and should — scare people…
Claudia Goldin is the newest winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics. Steve spoke to her in 2021 about how inflexible jobs and family responsibilities make it harder for women…
…dedicated war against child abuse in the United States of America.” Six of Johnson-Reddick’s eight children were admitted to the Nevada Children’s Home from 1963 to 1964 after they endured…
…the experience thinking, “It wasn’t bad.” I began to think that if I just had one appointment a month, I could pay my car loan with it, and have a…
…comes to the national debt. Stephen Dubner finds one of the few people in Washington who is willing to tell the truth — and it’s even worse than you think….
Host Bapu Jena is an economist and medical doctor whose latest research measures the link between birthdays and Covid. He explains his team’s findings, explores the role that kids’ parties…
…baby was about 9 months. I thought the length of that lag was intentional — meant to represent the wait one would have for a biological child. In recent months,…
…like Michael Jordan or Mozart? Those kinds of extraordinary people must just be different than the rest of us — more genetically gifted, right? A. That’s what it looks like…
We now have more access to TV, movies, and streaming entertainment than anytime in history. So what do we actually know about what all that screen time does to us?…
…of living conditions. Yet even with controls, the elderly who live with children do worse. This is in sharp contrast to younger adults who live with children, likely their own,…
In this special episode of Freakonomics, M.D., host Bapu Jena looks at data from birthday parties, March Madness parties, and a Freakonomics Radio holiday party to help us all manage…
…like creative thinking and problem solving? Can a test in which the test-taker – that is, the student – does not have a direct stake in the outcome actually command…
…economic content. Let me address first the issue of which place you should think about investing your money. As with any decision like this, you need to know first what…
…so unpredictable, and perhaps world-changing, that they imprint themselves on our memories and con us into thinking of them as typical, or at least likely, whereas in fact they are…
In research with Roland Fryer, later written up in Freakonomics, we asked the question “Does the name you give your child matter for her life outcome?” (I say “her” because…
Conventional programs tend to be expensive, onerous, and ineffective. Could something as simple (and cheap) as cognitive behavioral therapy do the trick?
…president of Harvard. He’s one of the most brilliant economists of his generation (and perhaps the most irascible). And he thinks the Trump Administration is wrong on just about everything….
…possible sanctions. The antithesis of this situation is the care children receive with their medical needs. If a med mal situation develops with a child all the parties responsible are…
Youth baseball — long a widely accessible American pastime — has become overrun by $10,000-per-year, for-profit travel leagues. Zachary Crockett peers inside the dugout.
Do you think public bathrooms are too small, smartphones are too big, and public transit just wasn’t made for you? Then you’re probably a woman. In her book Invisible Women:…
…to “musings on economics and child rearing.” I’m never quite sure whether this blog is about the strange things one discovers when looking at the everyday experience of parenting through…
…consumption externality: how internet use affects the prevalence of sex crime in general, and rape and child sex abuse in particular. The data come from Norway’s government rollout of broadband…
…that unlike mothers, who undergo a major physical change with the birth of a child, testosterone changes only affect fathers who are actively involved in the life of their child….
…a sheriff’s deputy helped his son flee the jurisdiction after alerting him that warrants had been issued for his arrest on child pornography charges. In Minnesota, a mother arrived home…
…statistical and analytic thinking requirement. Also, journalists have to rethink their policy of featuring only gory events and terrifying threats. Tensions that fizzle out (e.g, remember how a decade ago…
…is fixed. People with one child live very different lives than people with zero children: Parents move to the suburbs, rarely travel, and stay home Saturday nights. But once you…
(Photo: Dave Herholz) We’ve written in the past about the relationship between a child’s month of birth and a variety of later outcomes. In SuperFreakonomics, for instance, we wrote about…
