The product recalls of 2007 covered 276 toys and focused primarily on toys manufactured in China, including Thomas the Tank Engine. A working paper by Seth Freedman, Melissa Kearney, and Mara Lederman examines the effects of those recalls.
A while back Dubner blogged about how Consumer Reports had demanded a recall of a number of rear-facing child seats because they performed so poorly in their tests. Now Consumer Reports has a recall of their own. Apparently they may have done some of the tests wrong. We will have to wait and see what their revised study finds. A . . .
We blogged here recently about Connsumer Reports study declaring that most infant car seats failed miserably in side-impact crash tests. Now comes word that Consumer Reports is retracting the study, an acknowledgment that the study’s methodology was flawed. According to this MSNBC report, the study was meant to test the seats in 38-mph crashes, whereas the actual speed of the . . .