Behavioral Economics

January 21, 2015

Can Economists See the Hot Hand?

With implications that extend beyond sports, believers in classical economics and in behavioral economics are debating whether players can have streaks.

January 20, 2015

How Chocolate Chip Cookies Explain Why We Save Less

Explained by behavioral economics, we save relatively little for retirement because of intertemporal selfishness and seeing our future selves as strangers.

January 15, 2015

A Mystery: Trying to Find the Middle Class

While everyone refers to the middle class and most of us say we are in the middle class, few know the characteristics of the group to which they refer.

January 9, 2015

How Men Act When They Outnumber Women

How gender ratios in the U.S. and China affect men's financial behavior can be explained with supply and demand and behavioral economics from Gary Becker.

January 8, 2015

Understanding a New Tax Issue

With the House requiring dynamic scoring of tax legislation from the CBO, the bigger tax debate resurfaces on how much redistribution and spending.

January 4, 2015

What a Blind Taste Test Showed About Beer

Behavioral economic ideas show that product differentiation and consumer preference are more from branding than the taste of colas or beers.

December 31, 2014

Alcohol, Marijuana or Tobacco: Which is Most Harmful?

When government miscalculates the negative externalities of substances like marijuana and alcohol, they waste land, labor, capital, time and money.

December 22, 2014

The Seven Ways We Pay For Free Parking

Including congestion, wasted gas, time and emissions, cheap parking creates negative externalities that variable pricing of parking spaces can eliminate.

December 16, 2014

Why Academy Award Winners Might Live Longer

Relating income inequality to the stress felt by low status Bolivian Tsimane men and academy award losers, researchers said that stress that harms health.

December 11, 2014

Is Your Favorite Economist Biased?

Illustrated through word use and data selection in research, politically liberal and conservative economists display a tendency toward confirmation bias.

November 25, 2014

What An Unemployment Rate Does Not Tell You

A single statistic like the unemployment rate for Japan, the European Union and the U.S. can be misleading until we look more closely at what it represents.

November 13, 2014

Should Water Be Free?

Although protestors in Detroit and Ireland say water is a human right, economists, citing a definition of a public good and a tornado alarm, would disagree.