What I'm Reading

We subscribe to the NYT for the weekends only, so you can imagine my frustration when it not only did not come yesterday, but it did not come today. Not having Saturday's paper, I can do. Not having Sunday's paper, and I'm giving some NYT person at the help desk a piece of my mind. Not really. I'm sure it has something to do with the fact that I overlooked the bill in the stack of bills and didn't realize I hadn't mailed it until after I got an bill saying I was late. Nevertheless, here's some of the articles I'm reading from today's paper.

1. Renters feel the effects of the mortgage problems. One in eight foreclosures are "non-owner occupied." So many renters are losing their homes, despite the fact they are dutifully paying their rent, because the owner is unable to pay the mortgage. I suppose this means the owner has a contract with his tenants that locks in the price, making it impossible to raise the price to cover his mortgage payments.

2. The guy driving the government's case against Barry Bonds is a special agent for the IRS with an interesting story, and apparently with significant ability to get steroid users to confess.

3. A good summary of the recent generation of capital punishment studies by economists and law professors. The article does a good job of showing to the reader that many, recent, sophisticated econometric studies show a deterrence effect. Joanna Shepherd and Paul Rubin of Emory are the two whose works I am most familiar with, and they have done several clever papers using natural experiments in the implementation of capital punishment (I'm mainly thinking of the moratorium on capital punishment during the mid-1970s), and they consistently have found a deterrence effect. And of course, in theory, there should be an effect. As the article notes, the more expensive an action becomes, the lower the demand for it there is. To quote Wolfers in the article, to say anything else is to be labeled an imbecile. So no one on the dissenting side rejects the theoretical idea of the law of demand. Rather, they argue that because there are so few executions in the first place, it is difficult empirically to get enough variation in executions over time and across the country to estimate the empirical model reliably. In other words, the difficulty is not that theoretical, but empirical. It is difficult to estimate the equations because the number of executions are so small, and Wolfers and Donohue in particular believe the estimates that are picked up are just too large as to be implausible. I have not followed this debate super, super closely so I don't have an opinion about the studies.

4. Most dangerous cities in America vs. the fattest.

5. Slashfilm reports their predictions of who will play the parts of Superman, Flash, Green Lantern, and Talia Ghul in the upcoming Justice League movie. No mention of Batman.