Is advertising evil?
Vox says the data supports Matt’s priors: There is an old debate in economic theory… about whether advertising increases or decreases the prices of consumer goods. Some have argued that advertising...
View ArticleHousing wealth and consumption – an upper bound, not an estimate
Via Economist’s View, I saw this paper by Case, Quigley, and Shiller (REPEC). Let me start with the positives, which are many: They are excellent writers, They get to the point – and have a clear idea...
View ArticleHousing fuelled consumption boom?
In the EJ: There is strong evidence that house prices and consumption are synchronised. There is, however, disagreement over the causes of this link. This study examines if there is a wealth effect of...
View ArticleExperience may not improve judgement
We’ve all met hardened cynics in our professional lives. Those people who think the worst of those they meet at every turn because they’ve been burned so many times. They give nobody the benefit of the...
View ArticleSonification
Visualisation is the trendy way to represent data these days, but sight is not our only sense. Via Dave Giles I see that some researchers are exploring sonification as a way to represent information....
View ArticleLies, damn lies, and statistics
Last week David Grimmond wrote (here and here): However, despite the great informational power of statistics, bear in mind that sample based statistics are still always measured with error. How often...
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Quote(s) of the day: Keuzenkamp on controls and data mining
As I indicated here I am reading Probability, Econometrics, and Truth. A nice outline of things, I’m enjoying it at present (I was 20% of the way through when I wrote this post over five weeks ago)....
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Quote of the day: Pinker on changes in social sciences
Via Noah Smith. We have the following post on the Pinker vs Wieseltier debate on science and humanities (if you have a chance I would suggest reading the debates themselves as well). The era in which...
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Nobel 2013: Fama, Shiller, and Hansen
Yah, Nobel prize. All guys that deserved it … I just wouldn’t have expected them to get it together. To be honest, the reasoning makes sense though – they have all added significantly to the...
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Our competitive nature is not natural
The heart of economics is an understanding of human choice. Our theories are almost all constructed on a utilitarian model of preferences and choice so understanding how we can improve that model is...
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