Tuesday's Assorted Links
Snow Costs, Turnitin and ChatGPT, Vacation Fines, Lottery Tickets, and Modern Family Size
Hi y’all! Here are five stories from this week that contained a lot of neat applications of economic principles.
Snow is peaceful when it falls, but it leads to billions of dollars in cascading costs [The Hustle]
Turnitin will release an update that allows educators to detect if students used ChatGPT in their papers [Business Insider]
Employees at an Indian startup face a $1,200 fine if they contact co-workers who are on vacation [Business Insider]
Can economics explain why we continue to see record-breaking lottery jackpots so often? [USA TODAY]
Four charts showing how the modern family size is changing [NBC News]
A new study finds close to 13% of childhood asthma is caused by the use of gas stoves, but there are a couple of ways policymakers can address these negative consumption externalities. While people are afraid a nationwide ban is coming, there are alternative policies that allow people to continue using gas stoves.
Get caught up on Monday’s newsletter:
This week I’ll teach my first sports economics course in nearly 10 years! I taught this class when I was a graduate student at Washington State University, but I never got the opportunity to teach it at Penn State. I have developed a habit of assigning more traditional books in my field courses rather than a traditional textbook, and I think a lot of students appreciate the change.
I’m using two of the same books I used when I first taught the course, but one has been updated for the 2022 World Cup. The Soccernomics, it was nice seeing updated data and the revisions that have occurred since I first read the book. Scorecasting hasn’t been updated in 10+ years, but it was still fun to see which anecdotes are still accurate today.
