Is John List the new Chuck Norris?

Is John List the new Chuck Norris? I think so.

Lectures from the 2010 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences

From Mark Thoma at Economist's View, here are links to the Nobel lectures by Peter Diamond, Dale Mortenson, and Christopher Pissarides.

Taxation for Cultural Change

Now that the month of Movember is over, I thought I would post some interesting evidence on the use of taxation to achieve cultural change.

In 1705, Peter I of Russia implemented a tax on beards: Individuals who wore beards were required to pay a levy and, as evidence of having paid the tax, had to wear

a copper or silver token with a Russian Eagle on one side and on the other, the lower part of a face with nose, mouth, whiskers, and beard. It was inscribed with two phrases: "the beard tax has been taken" and "the beard is a superfluous burden".

Whatever you may think of beards and mustaches as aesthetic facial hair, Peter had his reasons. He was particularly interested in increasing trade and political interactions with the rest of Europe, much of whom viewed Russia as archaic. To try and change this perception:

Peter ordered his noblemen to wear fashionable Western clothes instead of their archaic long costumes. To add insult to injury, Peter personally cut off the beards of his noblemen. All men except the peasants and priests had to pay Peter's yearly beard tax and wear a medal proclaiming, "Beards are a ridiculous ornament."

E-Commerce in Africa

CBC's radio show Spark had a recent discussion of African E-Commerce (episode 130). Basically, individuals are increasingly using cel phones to conduct business transactions using texting services whereby they are able to communicate their inventories of goods, their demands for goods, and transfer funds between banks and individuals. Without cel phones, these transactions involved individuals traveling from village to village with their goods, incurring significant time costs while traveling between. These can be particularly high given that traveling to purchase some goods may require an individual to miss a day's wages. As such, cel phones serve the role of infrastructure in reducing the opportunity costs of engaging in transactions.

There are a lot of digital conveniences we take for granted in the Western world. Ok, let’s be honest and say we take most of them for granted. If we want something –anything– it is available at our fingertips. So what’s it like in places where the infrastructure still doesn’t exist to make those digital conveniences viable? Femi Akinde is the founder and CEO of Slimtrader, a company that is looking to change the way people in sub-Saharan Africa do business…all through their cell phones.

Keynesian versus Kenyan

Today is (mid-term) election day in the U.S.

Today, we have a guest post from UofC Economics PhD student Kent Fellows:

My Dad recently forwarded this link from the Globe and Mail. The article discusses a working paper by Anindya Sen, Marcel Voia and Frances Woolley in which data from www.ratemyprofessors.com is used to estimate the returns to physical attractiveness or "Hotness" among professors. Their conclusion is that more attractive professors not only earn more, but that their attractiveness is also highly correlated with their teaching productivity, and not their research productivity.

Dad is a recently retired professor emeritus, so I am not exactly sure of his interest in this topic. I have yet to ask him weather he feels that the family genes with respect to appearance improved his earnings or not.

From the Abstract:
"Although a relatively small proportion of our sample is rated “hot” by students, hotness generates, for some, a significant earnings premium, even with comprehensive controls for productivity. We find a strong relationship between hotness and teaching productivity, but a much weaker relationship between hotness and research productivity. The unique contribution of this paper is the use of data on actual productivity, which is generally unavailable in papers assessing the returns to appearance."

The main results suggest that for economics professors, being male and attractive is the best combination to improve earnings. Does this suggest that professional development resources in the department could be better spent on trips to the tropics to get a better tan and in house image consultants?

Economics and Art History

I'm currently reading Sassoon's Becoming Mona Lisa, a book about how Leonado Da Vinci's most famous painting became... well... his most famous painting, and likely the most famous painting in the world. Aside from the art history component of the Mona Lisa's story, there's a fair amount on the economics of art, production, and re-production:

The unique work of art is, by definition, in a position of monopoly. There is after all, only one Mona Lisa; there will never be another one. In a world dominated by reproducible commodities whose value plummet as technology lowers production costs and makes them available to an ever expanding mass of consumers, to be the “one and only” becomes a major selling point. For this to happen, it is necessary that the producer should be exceptional; better still, a certified artistic genius. A painting by an unaccredited artists, an amateur, someone not previously authenticated, is of little or no met value. Past masters have the advantage over their contemporary rivals of having had their fame repeatedly endorsed by a succession of arbiters of taste. ...

It is, of course, a tautological circle. A museum masterpiece can only have been painted by an established master; an established master is ones whose works are to be found in a major museum. (p. 78)