One of the things that Gary Hoover talked to Kennedy Owen about in in this video was the things that an economics major prepares students for. He mentioned that many of his students have gone on to law school and noted that Econ was the major that tended to do the best on the LSAT. This is from the Law School Admissions Council.  You can see that Economics majors have the highest mean and median LSAT scores as well as one of the highest admission rates ..read more

Kennedy Owen produces interviews at a pretty rapid pace. She has posted several new ones since I blogged about Time to Speak Econ a few days ago, including this one with Gary Hoover ..read more

 I received an email yesterday from Kennedy Owen, who is currently a junior in high school, telling me about Time to Speak on Econ a series of interviews she has done with economists. I checked them out and noticed there was one with the economic historian Josh Rosenbloom. I listened to the interview with Rosenbloom and then a couple of others. I like them. She asks questions about the education and careers of each person from the perspective of a young person who is considering studying economics in college. She has one of my favorite qualities in an interviewer: she asks relatively ..read more

  Yes, NBER charges for downloads of working papers, but you can watch some recent meetings for free. By the way, it has also been my experience that you can usually find ungated versions of most NBER working papers if you look around.   I think both the Race and Stratification Economics and the Development of the American Economy meetings should be of interest to readers of this blog.   The final presentation at the Race and Stratification meeting is University of Mary Washington economics alum Lavar Edmonds, who is currently working on a Ph.D. in economics at Stanford, present ..read more

  Everyday Economic Justice: Mediating Small Claims in Mexico City, 1813–1863 Louise E. Walker Abstract This article examines economic justice in nineteenth-century Mexico City through analysis of small-claims conflicts—juicios verbales. After the promulgation of the 1812 Cádiz Constitution, this centuries-old tradition of judicial arbitration was shaped by liberal constitutionalism. A new class of officials, the alcaldes constitucionales, were elected by residents to decide cases. Cádiz liberalism inaugurated a new world. What happened when people faced a classic problem, when they did n ..read more

 I have argued numerous times that the differences between economic and history tend to be exagerated, usually by economists who want to criticize history or historians who want to criticize economics. So, I really liked this paper by Sheilagh Ogilvie that reviews research on serfdom by both historians and economists and makes the case that the differences are exagerated and that the diferences that do exist make the fields complements, not substitues. Economics and History: Analyzing Serfdom Economics and history are often regarded as antithetical. This paper argues the opposite. It bu ..read more

  There are many good books on various aspects of the history of credit: Rowena Olegario’s A Culture of Credit: Embedding Trust and Transparency in American Business, Josh Lauer’s Creditworthy A History of Consumer Surveillance and Financial Identity in America , Louis Hyman, Debtor Nation: A History of America in Red Ink, Anne Fleming’s City of Debtors: A Century of Fringe Finance, Judge Glock’s The Dead Pledge: The Origins of the Mortgage Market and Federal Bailouts, 1913–1939. I can also point to some good books on law and credit, particularly bankruptcy law: Bruce Mann’s Republic of D ..read more

  This is the second post on the podcast How I Built This and academic research on business history and entrepreneurship. Danny  Meyer founded some of the most highly regarded restaurants in New York: Eleven Madison Park, Union Square Café, and Gramercy Tavern. He is also the founder of Shake Shack, which generates over $400 million in revenue a year. When he decided that he wanted to get into the restaurant business rather than go to law school a college friend got him an interview that led to his first restaurant job. Later he was able to use his father’s connections in the travel ..read more

  I just listened to an episode Econ Roots, in which Mike Munger was interviewed about the importance of Douglass C. North. Like myself, Munger went to Washington University and worked with North. His answer to why North was important was that “he had a view of economic history that took time seriously.” He notes, for example, that North would ask about where preferences came from rather than taking them as given. It is a great podcast episode, but my personal answer to the question would be slightly different because I had recognized the importance of explain changes in institution over ..read more

  This post was prompted by the most recent episode of Hidden Brain Putting Our Assumptions to the Test in which Shankar Vedantam talked to Abhijit Banerjee about the use of experiments in economics, specifically randomized controlled trials RCTs to study development economics.  I like the Hidden Brain, and I always enjoy listening to Banerjee. There was, however, one thing about the episode that bothered me. I thought Vedantam made it sound like Banerjee's work reflected a contest between theory and experiment, rather than emphasizing the importance of both. The problem with this ap ..read more