A Free Market Solution (from Europe) to the Labor Problems in North American Sports
The following is a guest post by David Berri, a Professor of Economics at Southern Utah University. He is also the lead author of Stumbling on Wins, the general manager of the sports-economics blog Wages of Wins, and is a frequent contributor to the Freakonomics blog.
Soon after presents are opened on Christmas morning, the NBA – after a lengthy lockout – will finally open its 2011-12 season with a slate of five games. Although NBA fans are pleased the lockout has ended, they’d probably prefer that it had never happened. Unfortunately for fans of pro sports in North America, such disputes frequently cause games to be missed. But maybe there is a free market solution to this problem to be found in, of all places, Europe.
Although we tend to think such disputes are a contest between labor and management, frequently the real conflict – as noted in my recent posts here — is between small and large market teams. In North American sports, team revenue seems to depend on the size of the market where the team plays. Read More »
How Much Do Mood Swings Drive Business Cycles?
Every month, the Conference Board releases its consumer confidence index. Last month, confidence was up. The index is supposed to be a reading of how we feel about the current economic climate, a measurement of what Keynes referred to as our animal spirits. But while these surveys indicate how we’re reacting to the economy, they also influence it, creating a sort of self-reinforcing feedback loop. So, is the economy dictating our mood? Or is our mood dictating the economy?
A new working paper (pdf here) by Paul Beaudry, Deokwoo Nam, and Jian Wang attempts to untangle the two by asking whether (and if so how much?) mood swings drive business cycles: Read More »
Listen Carefully as Our Menu Options Have Recently Changed
Moving houses has always been like having three teeth removed without anesthetic. These days the pain is accentuated by having to wait on the phone hearing, “Please listen carefully as our menu options have recently changed.” That’s corporate-speak for, “Don’t even bother pressing zero hoping to speak to a human. That’ll just put you back at the beginning.”
My latest such adventure started with an email from the phone company (Verizon). I was told that a technician would come to hook up our new service during the time “window” of 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. If a window is an opening in a wall, then 8 am to 5 p.m. is more like the whole wall. Trying to shrink the window, I spent more than an hour on hold for one person after another who could only forward me to someone else equally unhelpful. The circular chain of authority finally snapped when the last person claimed (all this discussion is at 10 a.m. on the day itself) “We have absolutely no way to reach the technician.” And then asked “Have I provided excellent service today?” Read More »
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. If you haven’t seen it yet, the movie features Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, and was made by a dream team of documentary directors. Paste Magazine named it one of the 