Prove My Friend Wrong: Come Up with Ideas for an Economic Study

[NoahSD]

My friend's been in the economics community for a few years now. He's been telling me about lots of cool studies that economists have done, and they all seem really interesting. Here are a few things they've looked into to give you an idea of what I'm talking about:

1) The effect of abortion on the crime rate . (It lowers it substantially).
2) Racism of referees . (NBA refs hugely favor people of the same race. "These biases are sufficiently large that
we find appreciable differences in whether predominantly black teams are more likely to win or lose,
based on the racial composition of the refereeing crew.")
3) The effect of the death penalty on murder rates. (Stuff's pretty inconclusive here as I understand it. Here's a paper explaining some of the history. Keep in mind that this is an issue that people are very emotional about, so there are lots of accusations of biased work.)

Anyway, my friend has tools at his disposal to do this research, and I think he should be doing tons of it.

He claims that good ideas like those above are really hard to come up with. I'm too stupid to prove him wrong, but I'm hoping EDF can. Please suggest economic studies that seem easily doable.

Some requirements for a good suggestion:

1) Obviously, the idea must be interesting. Controversy is fine, but not required. Any study whose result would be interesting to lawmakers would be awesome.
2) The idea must be testable with existing, accurate data. For example, Steve Levitt did a very rough study on people’s names in Freakonomics, which was reasonable because people’s names are recorded in a ton of places. A study on dog names would be much less reasonable because they’re less likely to be recorded. If you’re not sure if a dataset is available, err on the side of suggesting, but please don’t suggest studies that you know would require gathering new data.

The kicker is that if an idea's really good, my friend might actually end up researching it, and obv he's a good guy and will give proper acknowledgment.

[NoahSD]

Also, you guys will do this anyway, but feel free to use this thread to just talk about the studies that I discussed or bring up others.

[clowntable]

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2) The idea must be testable with existing, accurate data.

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Sorry, we don't agree.

[NoahSD]

Could you clarify for those of us who are too dense to understand what you mean?

[Borodog]

I'm not sure what he means, but I know a bit about praxeology, and I'm not sure what his objection is. There's nothing about praxeology that says you can't perform empirical studies, like whether more people prefer waffles to pancakes or vice versa; praxeology just makes it clear that such empirical studies can not be used to discover economic law, only matters of preference. Well; empirical studies might point you in the correct direction to start thinking about an economic law, like noticing that supply is proportional to price and demand inversely so might lead you to think about the correct chain of reasoning to deduce the law of marginal utility.

In any event, there's nothing about praxeology that makes empirical studies less interesting. I would say they are more about psychology than they are "economics" per se; that is economics as the study of the rational allocation of scarce resources. Modern "economics", as say practiced in the advertising industry or financial markets is largely an empirical science that attempts to constantly measure or predict shifting patterns of preferences in the population. The main problem comes in when this econometric science is used to try to justify interventionist public policy; it inevitably leads to policies that are rife with economic fallacy.

[econophile]

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2) The idea must be testable with existing, accurate data.

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Sorry, we don't agree.

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While not all economics research is empirical, I think the OP's condition is fair. It sounds like this is the type of research that his friend wants to do.

[Borodog]

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2) The idea must be testable with existing, accurate data.

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Sorry, we don't agree.

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While not all economics research is empirical, I think the OP's condition is fair. It sounds like this is the type of research that his friend wants to do.

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That's a much more succint way of putting it.

[NoahSD]

Thanks, B-dog.

So, I mean... there are these studies out there that say that doing thing A more will make thing B happen more. When people then do thing A even more, thing B usually happens even more.

So, I mean. Draw conclusions from that however you want. I think there's actually an interesting discussion there. Just please don't hijack this thread with that.

That's sort of like having a debate about who should run for president and bringing up nihilism. It's just sort of not cool.

[tsearcher]

Is there a correlation between cheap subsidized student loans and tuition? That is, does the easy access to loans end up increasing tuition? Colleges and Universities don't have to be real careful or competitve as far as pricing their product.

In a similar vein, does the widespread availability of health insurance increase medical costs?

[NoahSD]

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Is there a correlation between cheap subsidized student loans and tuition? That is, does the easy access to loans end up increasing tuition? Colleges and Universities don't have to be real careful or competitve as far as pricing their product.

In a similar vein, does the widespread availability of health insurance increase medical costs?

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These are very good ideas, especially the second one.

Google's not cooperating, but I'm almost sure it's been done before. But if you came up with it on your own, that goes a long way towards proving my point [img]/images/graemlins/tongue.gif[/img].