Itzhak Ben-David is a Ph.D. candidate in finance at the University of Chicago’s Graduate School of Business. (Levitt is one of his dissertation advisors.) While pursuing his original research idea — the degree to which housing prices efficiently incorporate anticipated tax increases — Ben-David stumbled upon a slightly juicier topic: a real-estate sleight of hand known as the “cashback transaction,” . . .
We’ve got a column appearing in the June 10 issue of the New York Times Magazine, which is a special issue on the U.S. wealth divide. Our piece deals with some interesting new research on real-estate sales (more on this later today). I know what you’re thinking: more Realtor bashing! Well, no. Even though we’ve written various things about the . . .
This week’s New York Magazine breaks down how money is made by all kinds of New York City individuals and businesses from a yellow-cab driver to sex shops to financial firms. Levitt gets a hat tip in the “Drug Dealer” write-up. A CDC study finds that violence costs the U.S. more than $70 billion per year, as much as the . . .
The introduction of new pay-by-weight trash charges in Ireland seems to have produced a strange and troubling effect: an increase in burn victims at St. James Hospital in Dublin. Huh? The theory is that people wanted to avoid having to pay for all their trash so instead they burned it in their backyards. Gary Finnegan, editor of Irish Medical News, . . .
Just in time for tonight’s GOP debates, Michael Scherer at Salon offers a closer look at the growing GOP shake-up caused by presidential candidate Ron Paul, whom we’ve blogged about before. News from the International Journal of Hospitality Management: Diners will spend more money in your restaurant if it is scented with lavender. The bad news, as pointed out by . . .
Nicolas Gueguen, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Bretagne-Sud, performed a study in which his male research assistants approached 240 women in the street and asked for their phone numbers. Half of the women were asked the question accompanied by a light touch on the arm; the other half received no physical contact. Of those touched, 19% . . .
Levitt and Dubner have written before about the origins of star-making talent. But can the road to pop culture megastardom be calculated as a matter of statistical probability? Back in 1994, Kee Chung of SUNY-Buffalo and Raymond Cox of the University of Ontario Institute of Technology applied an equation called the Yule-Simon Distribution to this question. Their findings were that . . .
New research has demonstrated a link between the ratio of the length of the index finger to the ring finger to relative scores on the math and reading SAT. The relative length of these two fingers is apparently related to testosterone and estrogen levels in utero. While this research focuses on comparisons between the sexes, a logical extrapolation would be . . .
A study by University of Toronto assistant professor of organizational behavior Jennifer Berdahl found that, contrary to the conventional belief that a woman’s acting “feminine” in the workplace leads to sexual harassment, just the opposite may be true. Berdahl’s paper concluded that women who “act like men” are more likely to experience harassment, possibly because of the conduct’s use as . . .
A new study from decision scientists at Carnegie Mellon University and the RAND Corp. suggests that quality of life may be directly related to decision-making ability (a point further dissected in Dan Gilbert‘s Stumbling on Happiness, which Levitt has discussed before). From the San Francisco Chronicle: A study by credit- and fraud-reporting agency Fair Isaac Corp. reveals that Internet advertisers . . .
Our own Gary Langer analyzes polls on recently departed conservative icon Jerry Falwell taken over his lifetime. The results can be summarized as follows: “Popularity with most Americans was not among the Rev. Jerry Falwell’s achievements.” In a development on the link between motherhood and happiness, Science Daily profiles a study done by the U. Michigan Institute for Social Research . . .
A recent study by the ad agency BBDO Worldwide links habitual behavior to product brands. While the findings — that people adopt daily rituals like tooth brushing or midday snacking and typically stick to the same brands while performing them — aren’t very surprising, the methodology is impressive: nine months of ethnographic research in 26 countries, 2,500 hours of documented . . .
Harold McGee, also known as the New York Times’ “Curious Cook,” has an article about a new paper from a Clemson University research group led by Paul Dawson on the validity of the “five-second rule” — the old adage that if you drop food on the floor but pick it up within five seconds, it’s okay to eat it. According . . .
Here’s an agreeable way to usher in Mother’s Day: A study released by The University of Melbourne’s School of Behavioural Science shows that a significant number of college students consider their mothers to be the single most significant person in their lives. Out of a survey of university freshmen, 40% listed their moms as the most important and influential person . . .
The media has been abuzz lately over a new research paper by Dr. Paul Winchester of the Indiana University School of Medicine. It purports to find that babies conceived between June and August in Indiana perform worse on standardized tests. I can believe that this conclusion might be true. Fifteen years ago, economists Josh Angrist and Alan Krueger found that . . .
In their May 6, 2007, column for the New York Times Magazine, Dubner and Levitt wonder: Why do Americans spend so much time and money performing menial tasks when they don’t have to? What’s with all the knitting, gardening, and – as the Census Bureau dubs it – “cooking for fun”? Why do we fill our hours with leisure activities that look an awful lot like work? Click here to read the article and here to comment. This blog post supplies additional research material.
I’ve blogged before about my friend Justin Wolfers’ research on point shaving in college basketball and the death penalty. Now Justin is back stirring up more controversy with a paper that claims that there is racial bias on the part of NBA referees, written up in the New York Times by Allen Schwarz. The claim of the paper is that . . .
My good friend Roland Fryer has taken as his life’s mission to understand every aspect of the economic life of Blacks in America. His latest research, co-authored with another good friend, Michael Greenstone, tackles the issues of (a) who attends historically Black colleges, and (b) does it help them or hurt them if they do. Here are their key conclusions: . . .
The last quiz and the answer are below. My two further thoughts: 1) Many people outside of academia think that peer review is some sort of magical elixir that guarantees that papers that get published are right. This is simply not true. It is hard to do good research, and it is hard to read other people’s work and accurately . . .
The winner of the quiz goes by the tag KZ. If I can find out more about KZ, I will post that info. KZ recognized that there do not seem to be any controls for a time trend in the paper. While the authors control for all sorts of other factors like unemployment and seasonality, I think they have left . . .
Usually our quizzes are more on the whimsical side, but here is a serious one that requires a real investment of time. Some academics (at most one out of the three is an economist) in the United Kingdom recently published a paper in a journal called Applied Economics claiming that a 1 percent increase in the price of beer in . . .
Here’s an interesting paper from the British Medical Journal which argues that children’s anti-social behavior can be significantly altered by training their parents to be better parents. (And here is the BMJ‘s editorial summary.) The paper’s authors conducted a randomized study with 153 socially disadvantaged Welsh parents with children aged 3 or 4. Some of the parents were given a . . .
M. Scott Taylor, an economist at the University of Calgary, argues in a new working paper that the epic 19th-century slaughter of American bison — with 10 to 15 million buffalo killed on the Great Plains in barely a decade — was driven by a technological advance and a profit motive that both came from Europe. (Incidentally, this makes me . . .
It is hard to tune out all the talk about obesity in this country. In the past, such talk has led me to ponder how serious the problem really is, how obesity is measured, etc. It has even led to the suggestion that higher oil prices may help curtail U.S. obesity. Now here is a new working paper called “Why . . .
Are there more people living on Earth today than at all other times combined? Nope. The British Medical Journal is very critical of the international publishing company Reed Elsevier: “While promoting world health through its publications, including the Lancet, Reed Elsevier also organises international trade fairs for the arms industry. By facilitating the sale of armaments, Reed Elsevier is directly . . .
An article in today’s Wall Street Journal asserts that, while various life skills seem to deteriorate as people get older, our skill at making personal-finance decisions doesn’t peak until the ripe age of 53. “Baseball players are said to peak in their late 20’s,” writes David Wessel. “Chess players in their mid-30’s. Theoretical economists in their mid-40’s. But in ordinary . . .
Pennsylvania State University has set up a prediction market for the weather, letting two groups of students bet against professional forecasting services like AccuWeather in trying to predict the temperature in different locations. “To date, the weather markets have been as accurate as the major public forecasting services,” says the Penn State press release, which is printed below in its . . .
Is illegal downloading responsible for the music industry’s woes? Felix Oberholzer-Gee and Koleman Strumpf say nope. The I.R.S. will give you a pile of money if you help them catch a big tax cheat. Too bad they weren’t this generous with John Szilagyi, who was one of their own. These three guys look pretty thrilled to have produced the first . . .
Our latest Freakonomics column described a recent academic paper by Andy Francis. I asked him to respond to the comments that have been raised on our blog (see here). He was kind enough to oblige. Here is what Andy has to say: Thank you for all your comments. They were insightful, and I enjoyed reading them. Let me take a . . .
In Freakonomics (the book), Levitt and Dubner often combine disparate subjects to sensible, if startling effect: the commonalities between sumo wrestlers and schoolteachers, for instance, or the KKK and the National Association of Realtors. In their latest Freakonomics column in the New York Times Magazine, they combine another seemingly unlikely pair of ideas: price theory and sexual preference. What does one have to do with the other? And what does it matter?