Tuesday's Assorted Links
Tuesday's Assorted Links
Covid vaccines, copying homework, Halloween candy, grade inflation, and pool chairs
Hi, y’all! Here are five stories from the past week that I found really interesting. I hope you enjoy them as well:
A new research study suggests that mandating COVID vaccines on college campuses reduced “total US COVID-19 deaths” by approximately 5% [NBER]
The ability to copy answers from the internet resulted in the benefit of homework being cut in half [Educational Psychology]
Hershey announces that capacity challenges and a shortage of raw ingredients may cause issues this Halloween [The Washington Post]
Grade inflation may be the primary driver of increased college attainment rates over the past 30 years [AEJ: Applied Economics | Podcast Summary]
Hotels have found a way to differentiate customers further by charging pool users for the lounge chair [The Wall Street Journal]
Yesterday I wrote about the new DOJ lawsuit that seeks to prevent the merger between two of the US’s largest publishers of top-selling books.
This 5 minute read covers oligopolies, concentration ratios, and why monopsony power is an issue:
Week 30 is over and I’m still at 30 books for the year. I finally caught back up after finishing two books over the weekend. I finished A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Bachman and The Berlin Exchange by Joseph Kanon. Both were really solid reads and the pace of the story was easy to keep up with. People often ask how I read multiple books at the same time and this is a really good example of how it’s possible. The two stories are so completely different that I don’t get lost between the two narratives. I think I’d struggle if I was reading books that were on the same topic or part of the same genre.
I just recently received Paul Oyer’s An Economist Goes to the Game in the mail and I’m really excited to get that one started. We haven’t had a good sports economics press book come out since Scorecasting, which is one of my favorites to recommend to students. Both take the Freakonomics-style of storytelling and apply it to various sports topics.