The FREAK-est Links
Should age be measured according to “years left to live”? (Hat tip: Marginal Revolution) Study profiles the average identity thief. (Earlier) More baseball promotions: free tacos for stolen bases. (Earlier) Rock Paper Scissors goes high-tech. (Earlier) Read More »
What’s the Most Important Psychological Experiment That’s Never Been Done?
That is the very good question posed on the British Psychological Society’s research blog. The answers, provided by leading psychologists, are even better. In many cases, it’s not that the experiments haven’t been done, but that they can’t be, often for ethical or practical reasons. But even if the proposed experiments are only thought experiments, Read More »
More Evidence on the (Lack of) Impact of School Choice
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 Read More »
The Debate on Female Happiness Heats Up
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 Read More »
Why Are Women So Unhappy?
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 Read More »
Do Newspapers Use Economic News to Sway Public Opinion?
As Levitt has noted in the past, media bias is a hot topic among some economists. Typically the bias is reflected in a paper’s reporting (as Dubner pointed out here). But can newspapers also influence public opinion based on their coverage of economic matters? That’s the question addressed in the working paper “Partisan Bias in Read More »
The Science of Passing the Bar Exam: Does First-Year Torts Really Matter?
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 Read More »
FREAK-TV: ‘All the Death Threats Came From the Left’
Video There’s a new Freakonomics video today, the third and final installment of Levitt talking about his academic research, co-authored by John Donohue, that linked a rise in legalized abortion to a drop in crime. (You can access Parts 1 and 2 in the thumbnail images beneath the video player.) In this piece, Levitt talks Read More »
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