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.