My friend Joshua Gans is one of Australia’s best young economists, and he is also a parent. And as passionate as Joshua is about economics, he’s just as passionate about parenting. While it has always been fun to follow Joshua’s economic musings on his blog, Core Economics, I have been having more fun following his parenting blog, Game Theorist, devoted . . .
If we judge politicians by what they buy, then Eliot Spitzer has clearly violated the public’s trust: he purchased the services of a high-priced prostitute, and may well end his political career as a result. But what if we judge politicians by what they sell? On this score, Spitzer may be one of the few politicians who has not prostituted . . .
There has been a lot of hand-wringing about whether or not the U.S. economy is currently in a recession. This morning’s data will, I think, lead to a near-unanimous view that the U.S. economy is in a recession. Not only was employment growth in February negative, but the B.L.S. also tells us that the previous two months were worse than . . .
Yesterday, the Times reported the results of an intriguing new study, just published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (subscription required). The focus of the story: the placebo effect. The existence of a placebo effect is well known, and the best work on this topic comes from Anup Malani, another economist (and a good friend) who currently teaches . . .
The political aficionados in Freakonomics Nation are probably doing the same thing that I’m doing right now — continually reloading the major news pages, in the hopes of finding some useful information. There won’t be any hard data for a few hours yet, and even then, it looks like there may be a long night of vote-counting ahead of us. . . .
Yesterday, Ian Ayres blogged about his recent weight loss, and frankly, it’s a pretty impressive achievement. The secret, Ian tells us, is finding a clever way to solve the problem in which today’s best intentions are betrayed by our rather less determined selves tomorrow. Ian’s solution — committing to fine yourself if you fail — is pretty ingenious. So ingenious, . . .
Ian Ayres‘s recent book, Super Crunchers, contains an interesting description of the secret to the success of Netflix (a company that’s been discussed before on this blog). According to Ayres, Netflix’s movie recommendation algorithms are so good that they know my taste in movies better than I do. It is a source of wonderment to me just how well they . . .
Last week, Justin Wolfers offered an insightful analysis of Roger Clemens‘s career statistics and what those statistics imply about the likelihood that Clemens used steroids. The latest contribution to this debate is by sabermetric legend Nate Silver of Baseball Prospectus. Using only data through 1997, Nate generates a projection of what Clemens‘s stats should have looked like from 1998-2001, the . . .
Who says there’s no romance in macroeconomics? Betsey Stevenson and I are currently working on a paper for a forthcoming Brookings Panel, assessing the relationship between levels of economic development and various measures of subjective well-being. We are working with an absolutely fabulous data set: the Gallup World Poll. The good folks at Gallup are now surveying people in more . . .
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. . . .
Sports fans will probably be aware that Roger Clemens is currently before Congress, arguing that the Mitchell Report wrongly tagged him as having used performance-enhancing drugs. And last week, his agents released the “Clemens Report,” arguing that his career statistics somehow exonerate him. The full marketing spin is available here. I was interested in understanding how they could “prove” his . . .
I have heard from plenty of nervous friends around the country, anticipating the results from Super Tuesday. Truth is, I haven’t a clue who will win. But I thought it worth offering up my own forecast: My key forecast for tonight is that the televised pundits will reveal all sorts of confusion. Tracking results across more than twenty states, and . . .
A fun game to watch yesterday, with the Giants winning 17-14 over the Pats. More to the point, a clear victory for Steve Levitt, whose advice to punters was to take the “under.” A total of 31 points were scored, well below the 54.5 point “line” in Vegas. Congrats to all who followed Steve’s Freako-tip. Ian Ayres‘ successful tip was . . .
The Patriots are playing the Giants in Sunday’s Super Bowl. I thought it would be fun to put together a short Super Bowl preview. I’ll go first (Justin Wolfers): Cheering for: The Patriots. My first four years in the U.S. were spent in Boston, and that’s where I learned to love the sport that you guys call football. If it . . .
There’s been plenty of talk in recent weeks that a recession is coming (or that we are already in recession). Indeed, the latest reading from InTrade.com suggests that there is about a 70 percent chance of a recession – defined as two consecutive quarters of negative economic growth – in 2008. It is an interesting story, but today’s pessimism does . . .
When I tell my non-economist friends that I do research on the “economics of the family,” they often look puzzled. (The funniest response comes from those who think that this is the same as “home economics“; as Betsey Stevenson will tell you, I surely would have failed home ec.) But Tim Harford is a lifesaver, and his new book provides . . .
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 . . .
In my last post, I promised to say a bit more about prediction markets at Google. Google has been running internal prediction markets for a couple of years, and Eric Zitzewitz and I were fortunate enough to team up with Google whiz Bo Cowgill to analyze these markets. Ask any economist about the “theory of the firm” (what firms do . . .
A few observations about last night’s surprise result in the New Hampshire primary. Let me draw on the thoughts outlined in my column for the Wall Street Journal. First, red faces all around for the political prognosticators: Judging by the pre-vote polls and prediction markets, the Democratic primary in New Hampshire created one of the most surprising upsets in U.S. . . .
I have been looking forward to seeing the resurrection of serious political coverage, and finally The Colbert Report returned to the air last night. And it was a wonderful surprise to see Richard Freeman — who taught me labor economics at Harvard — as a guest on the show, explaining what unions do. A topical guest, in light of the . . .
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 . . .
In recent days, we’ve introduced a pair of regular guest bloggers, Ian Ayres and Sudhir Venkatesh. We are happy and proud to now introduce a third, a terrific addition and no stranger to readers of this blog: Justin Wolfers, an economist at Wharton and a great explorer of everything from racial bias in N.B.A. refereeing to the decline in women’s . . .
I blogged a few days back about the interesting new paper by Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers analyzing trends in happiness by gender, and finding statistically significant reductions in how happy women are relative to men. Elsewhere on the Internet, the paper has drawn the ire of a number of bloggers. Stevenson and Wolfers have fired back on Marginal Revolution, . . .
I saw Justin Wolfers a few weeks back, and I joked with him that it had been months since I’d seen his research in the headlines. It didn’t take him long to fix that — he and his partner in life and economics, Betsey Stevenson, made the news twice last week. The first time was in the form of an . . .
The economist Justin Wolfers, who has turned up on this blog more than a few times, has an interesting OpEd in today’s New York Times about the N.B.A. referee-gambling scandal. Wolfers is a sensible choice since he wrote a widely discussed paper about point-shaving in NCAA basketball and an even more widely discussed paper about racial bias among NBA referees. . . .
News reports yesterday say the FBI is investigating an NBA referee who allegedly bet on games that he was calling. This is a perfect problem for an economist to answer with data, and the obvious man for the job is Justin Wolfers, who has written papers on NBA referees and on point shaving in basketball! Message to Justin: Freakonomics blog . . .
Associated Press reporter Robert Tanner writes an article today stating that evidence strongly supports the conclusion that the death penalty reduces crime. As with most media coverage of controversial issues, there is a paragraph or two in which the other side makes its case. In this instance, the lone voice arguing against the efficacy of the death penalty is Justin . . .
Levitt blogged a few minutes ago about today’s N.Y. Times piece by Alan Schwarz about possible racial bias among N.B.A. referees. The piece is based on a draft academic paper by Joseph Price and Justin Wolfers. I have two quick things to add to Levitt’s post, and then a separate but related question. 1. Never in the history of the . . .
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 . . .