Seminar: Laura McCann

The next Economics Department seminar will be Friday, April 9th, at 3:30 pm in room 230 Wimberly Hall. The speaker will be Professor Laura McCann from the University of Missouri. She will present “A meldey of transaction cost research.” The presentation will focus on a wide body of research McCann has done measuring transaction costs in the context of environmental issues. As always, please invite our majors.

Order Bias

A great example of order bias in survey questions.

How Milton Friedman Saved Chile

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703411304575093572032665414.html

Wisconsin=Beer

The Beer Belly of America.

The clustering was so apparent that we wanted to check how it compared to the "official" data on this activity. So we gathered 2007 Census Country Business Pattern on the number of establishments listed in NACIS code 722410 (Drinking places (alcoholic beverages)) and divided by Census estimates for state population totals for 2009 and found remarkable correspondence with our data.

On average there are 1.52 bars for every 10,000 people in the U.S. but the states that make up the beer belly of America are highly skewed from this average.