EconTech

Rating RateMyProfessors.com

You’ve heard the reasons why professors don’t trust RateMyProfessors.com, the Web site to which students flock. Students who don’t do the work have equal say with those who do. The best way to get good ratings is to be relatively easy on grades, good looking or both, and so forth. But what if the [...]

Friday Economics 101 quiz time!

Posted by Daniel
One for the junior-birdman Hayekians, Coasians and such like:
Consider a finite quantity of a consumption good G, which is to be divided into two allocations G1 and G2 for two different agents with utility functions over G described as U1(G1) and U2(G2).
What would be the minimum information that a [...]

Praying for a Recession: The Business Cycle and Protestant Religiosity in the United States
(tags: religion class politics)

I was curious about the history of the word lynch. Going to the most obvious source for such things first, the venerable Oxford English Dictionary, I was highly disappointed by the definition:
trans. To condemn and punish by lynch law. In early use, implying chiefly the infliction of punishment such as whipping, tarring and feathering, or [...]

From VoxEU by Jane Humphries:

Child labour: lessons from the Industrial Revolution
Societies have long sought to eliminate child labour. Yet two hundred years after the first Factories Act and despite a level of prosperity that our forefathers would have deemed unimaginable, there are an estimated 186 million child labourers worldwide –5.7 million in forced labour, 1.8 [...]

Gabriel is taking requests, and someone wants to know where to get data.
Request #10: Data Sources
Starting on the requests. Today, Mike request (comment #10):
There are a number of key macroeconomic indicators generally used, such as GDP, CPI, and others I can’t begin to name. Is there some master list of who publishes what, and when, [...]

Economist’s View: Guns
(tags: guns, handguns, gun_laws)

Crooked Timber » » The Deficit Model of Poverty (and NCLB).
(tags: poverty, inequality, deficit_model, education, culture)

Anyone who keeps up with how these things get done know that purchasers of HD content from cable and satellite companies are getting screwed by the insane compression of HD quality. Nevertheless, I was surprised when someone pointed out that MSM has finally gotten around to reporting on it. Of course, this is just yet [...]

Warning: Totally irrelevant to the usual subjects of this space.
Objects of the class “Whoopi Goldberg”
I’m talking about actors who are undeniably talented but are almost always in bad movies, or at least movies that aren’t worthy of their talent. Sure, Whoopi was in The Color Purple, but that’s it. Other examples: Martin Short. Michael Keaton [...]

Researcher incentives and empirical methods
(tags: research bias methodology mining data)

Social Science Statistics Blog: Gelman’s Paradox (or, The Probabilistic Backwards Reasoning Fallacy)
(tags: probablistic_backwards_reasoning_fallacy)

From the nerdy(-ier?) Freakonomicist (otherwise I probably would’ve never written about this, and sorry for the length):
Think Twice Before You Wear Your “Free Mumia” T-shirt

By Steven D. Levitt

I was sitting in the student union at the University of Chicago last week when a student came by putting “Free Mumia” leaflets on the tables.
I have never [...]

A minor rhetorical (but theoretically important) rant of my own at the end.
Budgetary Bait and Switch
Bruce Bartlett and I disagree about the size of government. He would starve the beast, I would want it healthy and thriving, but I have no disagreement with his view of the general lack of character Republicans have [...]

The authors do note some limitations of their analysis, namely quality differences between pre- and post- merger products (they label this new products, I believe). Also, I have no idea how robust difference-in-difference techniques are. They are pretty obvious and absurdly simple (I developed them in a paper and thought myself all smart for creating [...]

This is an old VoxEU article that has been sitting unread in my browser for some time. It is worth reading:
Measuring the welfare gain from new goods
New goods are constantly introduced. Some have a major impact, others little. Consider the recent case of the Apple iPhone. How much has the iPhone improved your welfare? If [...]

VoxEU summarizes a series of analysis by Gelman that I have previously covered. Considering the quality of VoxEU summaries, I thought it worth posting.
P.S. Sorry for the outage the other evening, the power that my server is on seems to be quite unstable. After a power hiccup, a newly bad memory stick was causing networking [...]