I think the sheepskin effect is strong evidence in favor of the signaling model of education.  Modeled Behavior's Adam Ozimek's not so sure:[W]hat does it tell you about someone when they have invested a lot of money into college, come very close to collecting the payoff, but then failed to do so 75% through their senior year? Is the only differenc […]

Kevin Grier and I have a new piece up on Grantland, on that topic.  It is perhaps hard to excerpt, but here is the close of the piece: Another winner would be track and field. Future Rob Gronkowskis in the decathalon? Future Jerome Simpsons in the high jump? World records would fall at a rapid […]

1. CBO lowers its estimate of the output gap (pdf), some explanation here. 2. Ongoing news about Greece, in English, at this link. 3. The economics of scalping for Burning Man festival. 4. Do people care more about absolute than relative status? 5. Paper robots, and text here. 6. The econ blogosphere, in a nutshell. […]

Spy novelist Jeremy Duns tells the amazing story of Quentin Rowan, a young writer who based an entire career on patching together stories based on uncredited material from published authors, culminating in a patchwork job that Duns had blurbed as an “instant classic.” Rowan did not merely plagiarize to fill in some gaps or cover […]

In an excerpt from his forthcoming book The Escape Artists, Noam Scheiber has a behind-the-scenes story in The New Republic about how the Obama administration mostly botched the debt ceiling negotiations with Republicans last year. I'm guessing that Scheiber's best sources were the Treasury folk, because they come off looking the best -- advising O […]

Greece’s largest police union has threatened to issue arrest warrants for officials from the country’s European Union and International Monetary Fund lenders for demanding deeply unpopular austerity measures. In a letter obtained by Reuters Friday, the Federation of Greek Police accused the officials of “…blackmail, covertly abolishing or eroding democracy a […]

I got a kick out of this, good graphics. Let’s pick a rule for the comments on this post: you can only say nice things about people! For the pointer I thank V. […]

“XXXX is becoming more and more convinced that Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok‘s textbook is the big news in the field of economics education. Hope to use it for my class soon, wish I had it when I was a student.” The second editions are now out, Micro, Macro, and a consolidated book, more information […]

1. Fake rhino attempts zoo escape, in Japan.  Might the real rhino be more fierce?  Pointer from Ryan McCarl. 2. Killing a rhino by mistake in an anti-poaching demo.  Pointer from George Edwards. 3. South Africa sends rhino poachers to jail for twenty-five years each; a lot of the demand comes from here.  At $40,000 […]

The Center for the History of Political Economy at Duke University will be hosting another Summer Institute on the History of Economics this June. The program is designed primarily for students in graduate programs in economics. Students will be competitively selected and successful applicants will receive a $2000 stipend for attending, plus free housing and […]