Category Frances Woolley
The Shopping Cart Puzzle, or Intermediate Micro takes on Behavioural Economics
Today's typical grocery store shopping cart is much larger today the shopping carts of yesteryear. The question is: why? A behavioural economist would observe that people buy more when shopping carts are larger. For example, an AER article by Wansink, Just and Payne notes: ….consumption can also be unknowingly influenced by environmental cues—benchmarks or reference […]
Egalitarian airlines
Jules Dupuit gave the classic account of the indignities of second class travel, and the economics behind them: It is not because of the few thousand francs which would have to be spent to put a roof over the third-class carriage or to upholster the third-class seats that some company or other has open carriages […]
Questioning grades: a very short survey
If you've ever been a student or a teacher, please answer this seven question survey: Take part in our online survey I explain what the survey is about below the fold.
The students’ dilemma
Imagine a world where education is of no intrinsic value, and serves only as a signal of an unobservable character trait called "ability." Performance (which can be observed) is determined by both ability and effort. Effort is costly. Some students have a high level of ability, and some have a low level of ability. A professor's […]
Free-riding economists, revisited
In a classic experimental economics paper, Marwell and Ames observed Economists Free Ride, Does Anyone Else?
Wikipedia nails it
Wikipedia entries on economics seem to be written mostly by graduate students, eager to share their knowledge with others, and a disproportionate number of Austrian, feminist and other heterodox economists. Sometimes they get it pretty much exactly right, as with this description of the practice of economics:
Thinking of coming to Canada to do an MA in Economics?
Every year, thousands of international students apply to Canadian MA programs in Economics. Studying abroad represents an investment of tens of thousands of dollars. Yet, without knowledge of Canadian customs and institutions, how can a student make the best of that investment? Here are some common questions international students ask (and some students don't ask […]
Five years of the Working Income Tax Benefit
Quietly, without (much) fanfare, Stephen Harper's Conservative government has been gradually promoting a new model for income support programs: the Working Income Tax Benefit, or WITB. On the face of it, WITB looks very similar to the Liberal government's signature program, Canada Child Tax Benefit (CCTB). Both WITB and CCTB provide cash support to low […]
Why politicians court the middle class
Raphael Deketele, a student in my fourth year honours seminar, just unearthed a strange finding from the 2006 World Values Survey (WVS). The WVS interviewed over 1000 Americans, and asked them: Here is a scale of incomes on which 1 indicates the “lowest income decile” and 10 the “highest income decile” in your country. We would […]
The dubious value of doctors’ notes
Students get sick around exam time. Cold, damp weather, combined with lack of sleep, poor diet, and stress, is a recipe for illness. I’m sure that the students who woke up last week and thought, “I don’t feel well enough to write a midterm exam today” truly didn’t feel very well. But what degree of […]
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
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