Freakonomics is more about “entertainment” than it is a serious attempt at popularization. Consequently, rather than conduct a comprehensive fact check, I use the book as a springboard for a broader inquiry into social science research and take issue with the book's surprising premise that “Economics is a science with excellent tools for gaining answers but a serious shortage of interesting questions.” Using examples from Freakonomics, I argue that some of the questions the book addresses are “uninteresting” because it is impossible to even imagine what a good answer would look like. I conclude with some thoughts about the role of economic theory in generating interesting questions and/or answers.

In this paper, the authors address the question of whether wages are affected by labor-market conditions in a manner more consistent with a contract approach than with a standard spot market model. From a simple implicit contract model, they derive implications about the links between wages and past labor market conditions. Using individual data from the Current Population Survey and the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, the authors find that an implicit contract model with costless mobility describes these links better than either a simple spot market model or an implicit contract model with costly mobility.

In this paper we address the question of whether wages are affected by labor market conditions in a manner more consistent with a contract approach than with a standard spot market model. From a simple implicit contract model, we derive implications about the links between wages and past labor market conditions. Using individual data from the Current Population Survey and the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, we find that an implicit contract model with costless mobility describes these links better than either a simple spot market model or an implicit contract model with costly mobility.

Survey nonresponse and attrition undermine the validity of many and possibly most econometric estimates. We propose that survey administrators and evaluators proactively create an instrument for observation, for example, by ex ante randomizing participants to differing intensity of follow-up. We illustrate how to apply our proposed methodology using a carefully conducted randomized controlled trial, the Moving to Opportunity demonstration project, which de facto randomly assigned a subset of subjects to more intensive follow-up. The approach yields treatment effect estimates similar to the unbiased estimator based on complete administrative data and has narrower confidence intervals than alternative bounding approaches.

1. Ten (10) web appendix tables. 2. Eleven (11) web appendix figures. 3. Five page discussion of intentions problem. December 31, 2008Lies, Damn Lies, and Pre-Election Polling By Elias Walsh, Sarah Dolfin and John DiNardo ∗ In this paper we ask the question: how well do pre–election polls forecast the actual results of elections in the U.S.? The question is interesting for a number of reasons. First, even polling data suggests about 1/3 of polling respondents do not believe that polls work in “the best interests of the general public ” 1 The situation is such that even many national governments have undertaken to restrict some aspect of pre–election polling. A 1997 international survey of governments, for example, found 30 of 78 surveyed nations had some kind of ban on publication of poll results (Røhme, 1992). Second, there is a a strong presumption in the literature on professional forecasting in other contexts which do not rely on sampling per se, (such as interest rate forecasting) that forecasts will be biased. 2 There are a variety of explanations for why forecasts will be biased; one “honest ” motivation is that pollsters may avoid reporting results from the unavoidable “atypical ” polls. Third, in the literature in economics it is sometimes assumed that polls are unbiased forecasts (of potentially time– varying) underlying preferences for candidates. For a recent example, see Keppo et al. (2008) who characterize pre–election polling as a “noisy observation of the actual election outcome that

The recent rise in wage inequality is usually attributed to skill-biased technical change (SBTC), associated with new computer technologies. We review the evidence for this hypothesis, focusing on the implications of SBTC for overall wage inequality and for changes in wage differentials between groups. A key problem for the SBTC hypothesis is that wage inequality stabilized in the 1990s despite continuing advances in computer technology; SBTC also fails to explain the evolution of other dimensions of wage inequality, including the gender and racial wage gaps and the age gradient in the return to education.

Did Community Rating Induce an Adverse Selection Death Spiral? Evidence from New York, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut by Thomas Buchmueller and John Dinardo. Published in volume 92, issue 1, pages 280-294 of American Economic Review, March 2002

We use 1980 and 1990 Census data for 119 larger Metropolitan Statistical Areas to examine the effect of skill-group specific immigrant inflows on the location decisions of natives in the same skill group, and on the overall distribution of human capital. To control for unobserved skill-group specific demand factors, our models include lagged mobility flows of natives over the 1970-80 period. We also estimate instrumental variables models that use the fraction of Mexican immigrants in 1970 to predict skill-group specific relative immigrant inflows over the 1980s. Despite wide variation across cities in the size and relative skill composition of immigrant population changes we find no evidence of selective out-migration by natives. We conclude that immigrant inflows exert a direct effect on the relative skill composition of cities: cities that have received relatively unskilled immigrant flows have experienced proportional rises in the size of their unskilled populations.

This paper examines the short and longer-term economic effects of the 1966 Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) which increased the national minimum wage to its highest level of the 20th Century and extended coverage to an additional 9.1 million workers. Exploiting differences in the "bite" of the minimum wage due to regional variation in the standard of living and industry composition, this paper finds that the 1966 FLSA increased wages dramatically but reduced aggregate employment only modestly. However, the disemployment effects were significantly larger among African-American men, forty percent of whom earned below the new minimum wage in 1966.

Frölich (2004) compares the finite sample properties of reweighting and matching estimators of average treatment effects and concludes that reweighting performs far worse than even the simplest matching estimator. We argue that this conclusion is unjustified. Neither approach dominates the other uniformly across data-generating processes (DGPs). Expanding on Frölich's analysis, this paper analyzes empirical as well as hypothetical DGPs and also examines the effect of misspecification. We conclude that reweighting is competitive with the most effective matching estimators when overlap is good, but that matching may be more effective when overlap is sufficiently poor.