Turkey Shortage?

Check out this holiday-relevant article from Slate on the market for turkeys in the US.

Seminar: Murray

The Economics Department seminar scheduled for Friday, November 21st has been cancelled due to the illness of Professor Murray.

The details were supposed to be:

Our next seminar speaker will be Professor James Murray, Assistant Professor of Economics, Viterbo University. James is a UWL graduate (econ major). He finished his PhD at Indiana University and recently accepted a tenure track position at Viterbo University. He will present “Initial Expectations in New Keynesian Models with Learning,” on Friday, November 21st, at 3:30 p.m. in room 230. The paper can be accessed at http://www.murraylax.org/research/murray_initexp.pdf. Please invite your upper division students. I look forward to seeing you at the seminar.

Mitt Romney: Let them eat cake!

Romney goes on the record to let the big automakers go down. What are your thoughts? Are the externalities of their collective failure large enough to bail them out?

Google Flu Trends

Technology can help public health officials more quickly identify outbreaks of disease. Yesterday the NYtimes carried a story about Google tracking the geographic dispersion of the flu by tracking the origin of searches. It turns out the first thing people do before calling the doctor, is Google for "flu symptoms".

In early February, for example, the C.D.C. reported that the flu cases had recently spiked in the mid-Atlantic states. But Google says its search data show a spike in queries about flu symptoms two weeks before that report was released. Its new service at google.org/flutrends analyzes those searches as they come in, creating graphs and maps of the country that, ideally, will show where the flu is spreading.

The C.D.C. reports are slower because they rely on data collected and compiled from thousands of health care providers, labs and other sources. Some public health experts say the Google data could help accelerate the response of doctors, hospitals and public health officials to a nasty flu season, reducing the spread of the disease and, potentially, saving lives.

“The earlier the warning, the earlier prevention and control measures can be put in place, and this could prevent cases of influenza,” said Dr. Lyn Finelli, lead for surveillance at the influenza division of the C.D.C. From 5 to 20 percent of the nation’s population contracts the flu each year, she said, leading to roughly 36,000 deaths on average.

The NYTimes graphic is here and more importantly the data is here . The data would make an excellent weekly instrumental variable for certain activity.

Visualizing the Election

CNN and other news outlets would have you believe this is still a divided country with red states and blue states.

But a better visualization would shade the areas based not upon who won the state, but by the degree to which they won the state. And the states themselves shouldn't be represented as a function of their geographic size, but rather the size of their population. Here we have just such a picture, and its clear, we are all purple now. More can be found here.

Michael Wenz, Winona State, will be our next seminar participant. His presentation, “Is There Status Quo Bias? Evidence from Two Point Conversion Attempts in Football ,” will be Friday, November 7th, at 3:30 p.m. in room 230 Wimberly Hall. A copy of his paper is available here. Upper division students are invited. UPDATE: Link to paper has moved here.

Greg Mankiw on the Presidential Candidate's Marginal Tax Rates

Greg Mankiw has a nifty little post on his blog on how the presidential candidate's tax plans will affect an additional dollar earned were he to work more.

I'm with him:

The bottom line: If you are one of those people out there trying to induce me to do some work for you, there is a good chance I will turn you down. And the likelihood will go up after President Obama puts his tax plan in place. I expect to spend more time playing with my kids. They will be poorer when they grow up, but perhaps they will have a few more happy memories.