Hot Topic: Ubernomics
In 4 short years, Uber brought down the taxi kings of New York City. Students examine data from medallion sales and ride sharing services, and then identify the incentives and institutions that first closed the taxi market in 1937 and then flooded it with competition in 2011.
Hot Topic: It’s All In the Bag!
In the Bag! uses the economic way of thinking to investigate luxury markets, focusing on how firms like Hermès, Ferrari, and many elite universities use market power to restrict quantity supplied and keep prices high.
Hot Topic: Running Scared – Children Crossing the Border
Fall, 2014 (reposted Dec., 2015) Estimates of the number of unaccompanied children who tried to cross the border into the…
Institutions Matter: Experiments in Real Life
We don’t usually think of conducting experiments in social science. What would the mad social scientist do – imprison two groups of people in plastic bubble-biomes and use one as the control group while administering different economic or social policies to the other? Not likely! But, every once in awhile, social science ‘experiments’ happen on their own, and when we are alert enough to recognize them, we can learn a great deal.