interesting economics

Charles Courtemanche (UNC Greensboro) presents evidence of a relationship between gasoline prices and obesity. When gas prices are higher, p...

In a recent issue of Economic Inquiry, Wayne Grove (Le Moyne) and Andrew Hussey (U Memphis) estimate the expected return from earning an MBA...

In a new paper in Economics Letters, David Johnston (Queensland Tech) shows that controlling for other characteristics, blonde women receive...

In a new NBER working paper, Jason Abrevaya and Daniel Hamermesh (Texas) find that the gender of one's journal referee doesn't affec...

In a new paper in the Review of Economic Studies, Victor Lavy (Hebrew U) considers what happens when students can attend any public school t...

A recent NBER working paper looks at the relationship between a person's hight and criminal activity in the late 19th century. Using pri...

In a new NBER working paper, Roland Fryer (Harvard) looks at data from randomized trials that paid students based on school performance. Fro...

Do PACs give political contributions in an effort to "bribe" or otherwise convince politicians into voting in their favor? Or, do ...

In 2008, I wrote about a paper by Ebonya Washington which showed that legislators with daughters were more liberal as reflected in their vot...

The most recent issue of Economic Inquiry offers a number of interesting papers. I mention three of them here. First, there is evidence that...

In the February issue of the Journal of Public Economics, Niclas Berggren, Henrik Jordahl, and Panu Poutvaara present evidence that a politi...

Previous papers have shown that physical attractiveness has a positive impact on student performance. However, the past studies tend to not ...

David Card (Berkeley) and Gordon Dahl (Rochester) study family violence during football season, and show that (from the abstract): Controll...

Thomas Dee (Swarthmore) and Brian Jacob (Harvard) empirically consider the impact of No Child Left Behind legislation in the U.S. From the ...

A number of papers present evidence that males tend to perform better during competitions than females. This is true, even if we compare the...

Last year I posted on a paper by Joseph Price (BYU) and Justin Wolfers (Penn) that showed that NBA referees were racially biased. Price is a...

Females who participate in sports are less likely to get pregnant than ones who do not. This has largely been used to insinuate that by part...

In the spirit of unabashed self-promotion, here is a summary of some of my own research, as it appeared in the University of Miami B-School ...

The divorce rate is higher in urban areas than in rural areas. Why is this? It could be that the abundance of potential partners in urban ar...

In the current issue of Economics of Education Review, Cristián Bellei (U Chile) considers whether lengthening the school day increases stud...

Rucker Johnson and Steven Raphael (Berkeley) show that differences in male incarceration rates can explain much of the difference in acquir...

Ali Ahmed and Mats Hammarstedt (Växjö University, Sweden) conduct a straight-forward, but interesting field experiment in which they test fo...

In a recent paper, Rajeev Darolia (George Washington) and Bruce Wydick (U San Francisco) test how parents can affect the academic effort and...

Helmut Rainer, Elmut Rainer (both St Andrews), and Thomas Siedler (Essex) develop a model of labor market mobility in which whether or not y...

Gordon Dahl (UCSD) and Enrico Moretti (Berkeley) consider whether there is a larger demand for sons than for daughters in the United States....

Another paper out in the most recent Journal of Law and Economics studies the impact of natural disasters on corruption. Sort of. When a nat...

In a new paper out in The Journal of Law and Economics, Shin-Yi Chou (Lehigh), Inas Rashad (Georgia State), and Michael Grossman (CUNY) stud...

As you may imagine, I enjoy reading the popular press books and articles describing new economic research. Some are better than others. Most...

Victor Lavy (Hebrew U) looks for gender biases held by high school teachers in Israel. His results suggest that girls benefit from teacher b...

Jashua Goodman (Columbia) considers the impact of Massachusetts' Adam Scholarship on college attendance decisions. The Adam Scholarship ...

Being in Miami, I found this paper rather interesting. Richard Evans (BYU), Yingyao Hu (Johns Hopkins), and Zhong Zhao (IZA) test whether hu...

It has been shown that low-income families put less weight on academic quality when choosing schools. They are less likely to take part in s...

Christina M. Fong (Carnegie Mellon) and Erzo F.P. Luttmer (Harvard) run an experiment to test whether charitable giving to natural disaster ...

I recently read the book "Gaming the Vote: Why Elections Aren't Fair (and What We Can Do About It)" by William Poundstone. The...

Alan Gerber, Dean Karlan, and Daniel Bergan (Yale) conduct an interesting field experiment in which they give potential voters newspaper sub...

Brian A. Jacob (U Mich) and Lars Lefgren (BYU) study the impact that holding grade school students back has on graduation rates. Their abstr...

In a forthcoming article by Sendhil Mullainathan (Harvard) and Ebonya Washington (Yale), the authors empirically test whether one's past...

Jonathan Meer (Stanford) and Harvey S. Rosen (Princeton) study alumni donations to a university, and show that alumni are more likely to giv...

Lisa Barrow (Chicago Fed), Lisa Markman (Princeton), and Cecilia Elena Rouse (Princeton) study the use of computer instruction in teaching m...

Kelly Shue and Erzo Luttmer (both at Harvard) consider the role of "misvoting" in elections. Apparantly, not everyone is capable ...

State governments often place limits on the types of game that may be hunted. For example, to limit the averse affects that hunting can have...

It turns out that money can buy happiness, but you get more of a bang for your buck if you spend your money when you're young -- before ...

Joseph Doyle (MIT) studies the impact of foster care on child outcomes -- namely whether they commit crimes as adults. To do so, Doyle first...

In a forthcoming QJE paper, Gordon Dahl (UCSD) and Stefano DellaVigna (Berkeley) test whether violence in the movies influence violence in r...

In a recent Journal of Political Economy paper, Michael Baker (Toronto), Jonathan Gruber (MIT), and Kevin Milligan (British Columbia) study ...

When someone shows up on our doorstep looking for a charitable donation, does our potential donation depend on how attractive the fundraiser...

By requiring teachers to pass tests or receive certifications, we can ensure that public school teachers obtain some minimum level of educat...

Although this article made headlines a while back, I still want to include it on this blog. Joseph Price (BYU) and Justin Wolfers (Penn) fin...

In American academics, professors in certain fields make significantly more than professors in other fields. Here salaries are usually corre...

Ok, so this isn't a research paper. It isn't even written by a Ph.D. academic. But it is a good book, and gives a well-balanced over...