Behavioral Economics

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.

November 10, 2014

The Difference That a Sticker Makes

Because "I Voted" stickers indicate voting is a social norm, like paying taxes or saving electricity, people are more likely to act like their neighbors.

October 30, 2014

Is Ebola Threatening the Price of Chocolate?

While Ebola fear caused raw cocoa futures prices to rise in September, its long term rise has been because of more demand from developing nations.

October 29, 2014

How Chinese Economic Growth Relates to Restaurants and Pilots

China might not fuel world economic growth if instead of a 7 percent real GDP growth rate forecast, we use a regression to the mean of 3.9 percent.