Yesterday, I posted about the conclusions that Eric Bradlow, Shane Jensen, Adi Wyner, and I drew from analyzing Roger Clemens‘s career statistics. I thought that it might be useful to show how we got from the findings in the Clemens Report (exonerating him), to our somewhat opposite conclusions. So for budding forensic economists, here is a step-by-step guide, with pictures. . . .
The conventional wisdom holds that men and women have different abilities when it comes to competition (a view that’s certainly being challenged in the current Democratic primary). Labels like “lacking the killer instinct,” “peacemaker,” and “avoiding confrontation” are commonly assigned to women in competitive environments, while the supposed male knack for thriving in competition is cited as a reason for . . .
A few days ago, Levitt blogged about an interesting study finding that violent movies reduce crime (at least in the short run). The reason, according to the study’s authors, Gordon Dahl and Stefano DellaVigna, is simply that more violent movies means fewer drunken louts on the streets. It is simply an incapacitation effect. One way of testing this hypothesis would . . .
Fertility has become a big business in the U.S., with Americans spending up to $3 billion a year on treatments, drugs, and methods aimed at enabling couples to conceive. Discussions of modern infertility have focused on cultural factors like the rising average age of marriage and the influx of women in the workforce, with studies linking it to environmental and . . .
California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is one politician who can credibly claim that he is truly responsible for reducing crime, at least if you believe a new study by economists Gordon Dahl and Stefano DellaVigna. It isn’t his policies as governor, however, that he can take credit for, but rather his acting roles. In their new paper entitled “Does Movie Violence . . .
Here’s the second installment from our newest guest poster, Justin Wolfers. His first post can be found here. This weekend is the annual gabfest of the American Economic Association, running in New Orleans from Thursday through Sunday. It’s an econ-stravaganza, with dozens of parallel sessions running on just about every topic (the full program is here). For the past few . . .
I have blogged repeatedly about the propensity of the media to distort official crime reports to make it appear as if things are getting inexorably worse. (You can see past examples here, here, and here.) Crime has more or less been treading water in the United States over the last few years, although you would never know it from the . . .
That’s the assertion made by James Heckman and Paul LaFontaine in a new working paper called “The American High School Graduation Rate: Trends and Levels.” Here is their abstract: This paper uses multiple data sources and a unified methodology to estimate the trends and levels of the U.S. high school graduation rate. Correcting for important biases that plague previous calculations, . . .
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 in the Times trumpeted the results of a report that had just been released by the Educational Testing Service (E.T.S.). The E.T.S. researchers used four variables that are beyond the . . .
For the last few years I’ve been trying to convince businesses to run experiments in order to learn how to do things better. Why is it that experimentation is the gold standard in science, but rarely exploited in corporations? My own hunch is that the main reason is what economists call “path dependence” — in other words, businesses don’t run . . .
We posted an item the other day from a reader who kept landing on General Motors’ Web site when he went to use his Gmail account; he wondered if many Gmail users did the same, and subsequently wound up buying cars. We don’t have an answer to that question, but the whole scenario is starting to look a bit less . . .
Riskometer helps put health warnings in perspective. The wildest contract perks that MLB players have demanded, and gotten. (Earlier) Game theory expert confesses to wife’s murder. New study links entrepreneurs and dyslexia.
Dubner has blogged before about the difficulty of gathering accurate data from adults on subjects like racism. The problem, he noted, lies in people’s tendencies to give answers that are socially appropriate but don’t necessarily reflect their actual views. Children, however, are not often so guarded (or disingenuous, depending on how you look at it). As such, they can provide . . .
An interesting article written by Jeremy Hsu on Scienceline.org does further damage to the Spinning Dancer’s already damaged reputation.
That’s the question asked by the Wharton economists Fernando Ferreira and Joseph Gyourko. But they are not talking about national political parties. In that realm, party affiliation has indeed been shown to have a strong effect on legislation and policy. No, Ferreira and Gyourko are interested in whether party affiliation matters on the local level — and their answer, essentially, . . .
You might not think that mosquitoes would be a great topic for economists, but two recent papers prove otherwise. I grew up in Minnesota. The state motto is “The Land of 10,000 Lakes,” which meant that there was never a shortage of mosquitoes. When I was a kid, I wasn’t allowed to go in the backyard in the summer because . . .
Last week I linked to an intriguing visual of a spinning dancer. It is intriguing because some people see her spinning clockwise, whereas others see her spinning counter-clockwise. Moreover, some people are able to make the direction of her spin switch. The article asserts that the direction she spins is an indicator of whether your thinking is dominated by the . . .
Nobel Laureate James Watson got into trouble recently for expressing the opinion that blacks are less intelligent than whites. If you look at almost all existing data from standardized tests in the United States, there is indeed a sizable black-white test score gap. Whether the gap is due to genetic differences is a hotly debated academic question. Roland Fryer and . . .
[Addendum appended.] A few weeks back I blogged about allegations of cheating at an online poker site called Absolute Poker. While things looked awfully suspicious, there wasn’t quite a smoking gun, and it was unclear exactly how the cheater might have cheated. A combination of some incredible detective work by some poker players and an accidental (?) data leak by . . .
Courtesy of Marginal Revolution, take a look at this dancer. Is she spinning clockwise or counter-clockwise? For me there is no question: the answer is clockwise. For my wife, the image is without question spinning counter-clockwise. Our babysitter, April, sometimes sees her clockwise and sometimes the opposite. This little dancer offers a powerful lesson regarding how things we conceive as . . .
Decades of research has convinced just about everyone that a child with a single parent is, on average, more likely to have worse outcomes in life than a child with two parents. These outcomes are seen in a variety of channels: education, income, health, and crime. But what are the mechanisms that actually produce a worse outcome? Exactly how, in . . .
Crime rates have a large influence on the choices people make about where to live. The amazing declines in crime over the last fifteen years have been especially strong in big cities, a factor that helped fuel an urban renaissance. Ironically, however, some of the lowest murder rates are found in places where one might suspect just the opposite to . . .
The British Medical Association calls attention to a new study in the Postgraduate Medical Journal that assesses the efficacy of individually tailored herbal medical treatments. The outcome? “There is no good evidence to suggest that individually tailored herbal medicine treatment works well,” the BMA declares. The nuances here are interesting. While studies on the efficacy of herbal medicine have grown . . .
There is no policy economists love more than school choice. Milton Friedman was an early proponent. The idea certainly makes sense: if parents have the ability to choose the best schools for their children, outcomes should improve through both the better matching of kids to specific schools and the resulting competition that would force schools to develop their programs. The . . .
The following are headlines from this week’s major newspapers following the release of official 2006 crime statistics: From the Washington Post: Violent Crime, a Sticky Issue for White House, Shows Steeper Rise From the Los Angeles Times: Violent Crime Rises Again From the Philadelphia Inquirer: Rise in Violent Crimes is Higher than Expected It is official. The next crime wave . . .
Every year, thousands of law school graduates leap into the nerve-wracking and costly process of preparing for the bar exam. The bar consists of two days of testing (three in California) on memorization and comprehension of specific areas of law. Failure is hardly uncommon: various estimates place the passage rate at roughly 70 percent, while the failure rate in California . . .
From research by economists J.J. Prescott and Jonah Rockoff, here are a few current statistics on sex offenses reported to the police: 1) 25 percent of victims are 10-14 years old; 23 percent are nine or younger. 2) 22.5 percent of the offenders are family members. Only 8 percent are strangers. 3) 25 percent of sex offenses reported to the . . .
Video In the video player on the left, you’ll find Part 2 of Levitt’s discussion of the research behind the abortion/crime link. (You can find Part 1 in the video player as well; here’s the blog post that accompanied it.) In this installment, he discusses the collage of evidence that convinced him and John Donohue of the link between legalized . . .
Match the drug to the warning label. (Hat tip: BoingBoing) Does Consumer Reports need a lesson in data analysis? (Earlier) Meet Harvard macroeconomist Robert Barro. Hotels grapple with going green.
Video It’s always interesting to see where smart people get their ideas. Often, especially in the creative arts, it’s impossible to trace an idea down to its roots. But it’s easier in the social sciences. I, for one, believe that Steve Levitt has had an awful lot of good research ideas, and it’s good to hear how a particular idea . . .