Category Archives: From the Frontiers

So maybe they're not evil after all

Posted on August 6, 2006 by andrewleigh

In a new paper entitled Handedness and Earnings, Christopher Ruebeck, Joseph Harrington and Robert Moffitt conclude: Building on the very large literature studying laterality in biology and psychology, this study is the first to explore whether handedness correlates with measures of … Continue reading →

Posted in From the Frontiers | 4 Comments

Latitude, Longitude, and Letterman

Posted on July 11, 2006 by andrewleigh

Last year, University of Texas Austin economist Dan Hamermesh came to Australia for a celebration of Bob Gregory’s career. There, he gave a paper entitled The Value of Peripatetic Economists: A Sesqui-Difference Evaluation of Bob Gregory. The paper looked at valuing … Continue reading →

Posted in From the Frontiers | 5 Comments

No Stopping

Posted on July 8, 2006 by andrewleigh

One of the cleverer economic paper ideas I’ve seen recently. Cultures of Corruption: Evidence From Diplomatic Parking Tickets Raymond Fisman & Edward Miguel Corruption is believed to be a major factor impeding economic development, but the importance of legal enforcement … Continue reading →

Posted in From the Frontiers | 4 Comments

Imagine how much they'd pay not to live next to a politician….

Posted on June 20, 2006 by andrewleigh

How much less would the typical housebuyer pay for a home a few doors down from a convicted sex offender? About five grand, according to Leigh Linden and Jonah Rockoff. There Goes the Neighborhood? Estimates of the Impact of Crime … Continue reading →

Posted in From the Frontiers | 6 Comments

Thanatophobia and Taxes

Posted on June 8, 2006 by andrewleigh

Joshua Gans and I have been playing around recently with daily births and deaths data. Our latest paper looks at the abolition of Australian inheritance taxes on 1 July 1979 (a change legislated in 1978 under John Howard, then known as the … Continue reading →

Posted in From the Frontiers, Tax | 7 Comments

How much did you pay for your driver's licence?

Posted on June 8, 2006 by andrewleigh

I’ve recently been discussing a project with the ANU Human Research Ethics Committee, so ethical research is dear to my heart. Our application was approved yesterday (more on that later this year), but I’m not sure that this one would … Continue reading →

Posted in From the Frontiers | 6 Comments

Crack and pack didn't get them back

Posted on June 4, 2006 by andrewleigh

A commonly held view is that the extraordinarily high incumbent re-election rate in the US is due to gerrymandering (colloquially known to political operatives as “crack and pack”). My friends John Friedman (a Harvard PhD student) and Richard Holden (an Aussie … Continue reading →

Posted in From the Frontiers, US Politics | 12 Comments

King and Queen Beats Two of a Kind

Posted on May 22, 2006 by andrewleigh

I have a new paper out, looking at the relationship between the gender of your children and whether you’re married (8/10 parents are married, 1/10 have never been married, and 1/10 are divorced). If you think children do better when … Continue reading →

Posted in Economics Generally, From the Frontiers | 9 Comments

Red Fox, Blue Wapo

Posted on May 3, 2006 by andrewleigh

Two recent papers on media bias – written by some of my favourite economists – make a nice pair. We’ve always known that right-wing people were more likely to watch Fox, and left-wing people were more likely to read the … Continue reading →

Posted in From the Frontiers | 2 Comments

Can a prediction market predict the sales of a prediction market book?

Posted on April 12, 2006 by andrewleigh

More folks are piling on to the prediction markets bandwagon, with a new event being held in Chicago on June 7, and Cass Sunstein due to release a book on the topic, called Infotopia (which sounds a lot like The Wisdom … Continue reading →

Posted in From the Frontiers | Comments Off on Can a prediction market predict the sales of a prediction market book?

Half a billion here, half a billion there, and soon you're talking real bribery

Posted on April 11, 2006 by andrewleigh

Yuriy Gorodnichenko and Klara Peter have come up with a clever way of measuring bribery: This study is the first to provide a systematic measure of bribery using micro-level data on reported earnings, household spending and asset holdings. We use … Continue reading →

Posted in From the Frontiers | 2 Comments

Discretionary reading

Posted on April 6, 2006 by andrewleigh

My ANU colleague Bob Goodin is coauthoring a book on discretionary time, looking at data from the US, Australia, Germany, France, Sweden, Finland. They’ve put the first draft of the book on the web. Well worth a read for anyone … Continue reading →

Posted in From the Frontiers, Universities | 3 Comments

Why Do Europeans Smoke More than Americans?

Posted on April 3, 2006 by andrewleigh

David Cutler and Ed Glaeser think they have an answer: While Americans are less healthy than Europeans along some dimensions (like obesity), Americans are significantly less likely to smoke than their European counterparts. This difference emerged in the 1970s and … Continue reading →

Posted in From the Frontiers | 4 Comments

Do you always get the "right" answer when you use maths?

Posted on March 28, 2006 by andrewleigh

Ariel Rubinstein (NYU & Tel Aviv Uni) has a neat piece in the latest issue of the Economic Journal, in which students are asked to solve a firm optimisation problem, deciding how many workers a firm should fire. The profit … Continue reading →

Posted in From the Frontiers | 3 Comments