Category Archives: From the Frontiers

My friend Macgregor Duncan draws my attention to a WaPo piece by Shankar Vedantamon how people undermine government intervention by changing their behaviour.

Supercrunchers author Ian Ayres was on the BBC program “The Interview” today. For anyone who’s interested in how statistics can change the world, the podcast is here.

Economics is very concerned with causal inference. Here’s three recent examples of papers whose identification strategies are more interesting than their (unsurprising) results. This is not to say that we shouldn’t keep honing the methodological toolkit – good evidence for … Continue reading →

For anyone researching or teaching in the field of behavioural economics, Stefano DellaVigna has written the nicest summary paper of the literature that I’ve yet seen.

In the theme of economic imperialism, David Uren alerts me to this new paper from boundary-pushing Swiss economist Bruno Frey. The current draft is a bit terse (it probably needs to be 2-3 times as long to make its points fully), … Continue reading →

Chris Hitchens and Richard Dawkins may not like it, but the findings from a new paper on the impact of a religious childhood sound pretty reasonable to me.   The Role of Religious and Social Organizations in the Lives of Disadvantaged … Continue reading →

Knowing which companies are doing dodgy deals has always been the stuff of thriller movies. Now, Stefano DellaVigna and Eliana La Ferrara think they’ve come up with an economists’ trick – if you want to know who’s selling weapons to … Continue reading →

For over a generation, social scientists have discussed the ‘Easterlin Paradox’. One version of this is the commonly-held notion that above a certain threshold, GDP is uncorrelated with happiness. This turns out to be wrong. Income, Aging, Health and Wellbeing Around the World: … Continue reading →

A feisty US-Canada dispute initiated by our very own Joshua Gans now seems to have been resolved. For those who haven’t been following it, here’s the history. Gans: This one is for the clearly I have now seen it all … Continue reading →

I’m in Boston this week, attending the National Bureau of Economic Research’s Summer Institute. Thanks to the magic of the internet, you too can see much of what I’m seeing. I’m flitting between the labor studies, health economics, tax, and children’s meetings, … Continue reading →

A couple of fun new papers from the NBER, showing that (a) hot spells shift deaths, but cold snaps raise them (so moving to warmer climates is good for your health), and (b) it ain’t hard to manipulate charitable giving. … Continue reading →

Income and happiness: Evidence, explanation and economic implications Andrew E. Clark, Paul Frijters & Michael A. Shields There is now a great deal of micro-econometric evidence, both cross-section and panel, showing that income is positively correlated with well-being. Yet the … Continue reading →

Who said there was no money in policymaking? The IPAA (often confused with the IPA) is happily giving it away. 2006 Sir George Murray Award The Sir George Murray Award is Australia’s most prestigious essay competition in public administration. We … Continue reading →

Economics can teach all kinds of quirky things. For example, if your biggest concern is that your teenager doesn’t use drugs, then you should be happy when the price of street sneakers goes up, and sad when the restaurant owner … Continue reading →

We learned in 2003 that Europeans are taller than Americans, and the gap is getting bigger. From the Tallest to (One of) the Fattest: The Enigmatic Fate of the American Population in the 20th Century John Komlos & Marieluise Baur … Continue reading →

Harvard researcher Ben Olken spent a summer in Indonesia digging up roads, in an attempt to estimate the extent of corruption. His initial paper looked at the magnitude and correlates of corruption, while his latest compares corruption perceptions and reality, … Continue reading →