We have blogged in the past about an anti-poverty program in Chicago that gave cash and prizes to poor families who paid their rent on time, got their kids to school, and looked for work. But Michael Bloomberg, the mayor of New York, has gone even further than Chicago to suss out an anti-poverty program that he may adapt for . . .
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: . . .
America’s universities are producing an awful lot of economists these days. Too many? Well, if Levitt is successful in getting rid of tenure (don’t bet on it), there will certainly be some teaching openings. Otherwise, newly minted economists may wish to consider the career path of David Teece. Teece is a 58-year-old Berkeley professor who, noting that the legal system . . .
I first met Preston McAfee in Barcelona about 10 years ago. I was giving my paper on Lojack, which I had given way too many times because it was the paper I used on the job market. I had stopped getting new and interesting comments from the audience at least 5 seminars earlier. But in Barcelona, the next-to-last time I . . .
A few days ago, we asked whether blogging is perhaps dangerous to professors seeking tenure. Here is proof that citing Freakonomics can be dangerous to your academic health as well. A reader sent in this e-mail the other day, which we now reprint in full — minus the young man’s name and college, for obvious reasons. Dr. Levitt: I was . . .
I’ve changed addresses 10 times since I graduated from college. And each time I’ve moved, I’ve looked at the battered old box of college notebooks and debated whether it was time to throw the box out. After all, it has been more than 15 years and the box has never once been opened. Thomas Schelling winning the Nobel prize in . . .
Maybe, maybe not. But here’s the story of how Daniel Drezner, an assistant professor in political science at the University of Chicago (and an active blogger) was just denied tenure.
Malcolm Gladwell’s latest piece in the New Yorker is interesting as always. It is about Ivy League admissions. I particularly like this quote (especially the last sentence): The Ivy League schools justified their emphasis on character and personality, however, by arguing that they were searching for the students who would have the greatest success after college. They were looking for . . .
In Freakonomics, we talk a lot about catching cheaters using data. Based on a newspaper clipping that Stephen Stigler (a well-known professor of statistics at the University of Chicago, author of a wonderful book on the history of statistics, and son of the great Chicago economist George Stigler), there is a long history of using data to catch bad behavior . . .