Someone reading empirical research relating human genetics to personal outcomes must be careful to distinguish two types of work: An old literature on heritability attempts to decompose cross-sectional variation in observed outcomes into unobservable genetic and environmental components. A new...

Economics is broadening its scope from analysis of markets to study of general social interactions. Developments in game theory, the economics of the family, and endogenous growth theory have led the way. Economists have also performed new empirical research using observational data on social...

Research on consumer confidence has mainly sought to evaluate the power of available data to predict economic outcomes. In contrast, this article considers how best to measure consumer confidence. We analyze the responses to eight questions that have appeared recently on the Michigan Survey of...