Downloads and sales

Here’s an interesting analysis—’The Effect of File Sharing on Record Sales
An Empirical Analysis’ by Felix Oberholzer and Koleman Strumpf, pdf version of the manuscript .
The paper is forthcoming in Journal of Political Economy.
And the abstract:
A longstanding economic question is the appropriate level of protection for intellectual property. The Internet has [...]

I could have used this as a kid

Nothing like the pain when I learned to write with a fat, soft-leaded, pencil. And the hit my intellectual confidence took when they tried to fail me in the second grade because my writing was not neat enough.
The world is not that safe for lefties.
Cool Tool: SmudgeGuard
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Standup economist

It is pretty good.
Principles of economics

Pretty affecting

No other comment necessary: Arthur Silber .

Using data

This post: Omegamom-Metal-Night got me thinking about music from those days. And I remembered one of big shows I went to see as a young adult—Van Halen
Jamie’s Cryin by Van Halen (youtube)
I had a broken toe, and was extremely drunk/stoned at the show. All I remember now about it is how my [...]

Conveniently,

the piece by Varian linked here explains nicely what I was trying to say yesterday about theory, data, and Taleb’s piece:
Economist’s View: Hal Varian: What Use is Economic Theory?

Interesting discussion of ‘ex-ante’ versus ‘ex-poste’ here

NNT’s Blog: Quiz 7 – The problem with “drift” (The 1st who gets it wins a copy of The Black Swan )
For a guy who likes to complain about economics and economists, NNT’s point seems to be pretty close to arguing that you should take markets and basic economic arguments into account when you [...]

Marketingspeak: a successful (?) example

‘Daylight savings time’ versus ‘daylight shifting time.’

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Eeck

I thought we were safe from this show. We will have to watch it, and suffer.
CGSociety – Babylon 5 ‘Lost Tales’: Part One
via
Digg – Babylon 5 ‘Lost Tales’: Part One
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Here’s one reason empirical work is hard

According to Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:
In general, data consist of propositions that reflect reality. A large class of practically important propositions are measurements or observations of a variable.
But we should always be concerned about how the data was generated, and the incentives of the collectors/reporters:
The Big Picture | Analyst Back Dating Scandal: A Non-Random Walk [...]