Administrators at many universities are using the National Research Council’s (NRC’s) measures of departmental performance to assess the performance of their economics departments. The NRC methodology measures faculty publications, citations, and grants in specific ways, which...

We have created an online questionnaire that queries the respondent about whether the policy of pre-market of approval of drugs and devices has behind it any market-failure rationale. The questionnaire interactively interviews the respondent, making a virtual conversation. The point of the...

The costs of running a regression are falling rapidly, perhaps by 10-15 percent per year. Considerations of costs and benefits suggest that this will cause an increase in the mining ratio, that is, the ratio of the number of regressions made to the number published. An individual researcher’s...

Many public-health researchers are quick to raise charges of bias to explain away the few studies that reach politically incorrect conclusions. Claims of bias are often thrown at researchers who are funded by the industries targeted for aggressive intervention. This paper discusses whether it...

In the economics profession there is a tension between the scholastic orientation and the public discourse orientation. The former affirms certain academic conventions among economists such as mathematical model building and statistical significance. The latter emphasizes communicating with lay...

Using papers published in 2003 and 2004, we measure the extent of math-free research in top economics journals. Of more than 1200 papers published in ten top journals, six percent met a weak criterion of math-free, three percent an intermediate criterion, and only 1.5 percent a strong criterion....

We criticize an American Economic Review article that presents itself as a theory of design innovation and fashion cycles. Scrutinizing the model and surrounding prose, we suggest that the article does not make clear what it is that it purports to explain, and that the story of the model fails...

Do economists reach a conclusion on household and municipal recycling? I explore the policy judgments of published economists on recycling and find that there is no broad consensus. The mainstream recycling literature is dominated by a guided-market approach; taxes and subsidies are advocated to...

Rose Friedman (née Director), the Chicago-trained economist, was a very important contributor to Milton Friedman’s scholarly output, popular writings, and television series. His remarkable role in society was to a significant extent a joint role from which she cannot be separated.

This is a reprint of a brief essay originally published in 1951. Hayek looks back on the age of liberalism and its collapse. During the generations of growing darkness, there were a few figures who bridged the age of liberalism and the postwar revival of its ideas and values. Hayek identifies...