Most Popular Books by Steven D. Levitt

'A HUMDINGER' THE TIMES BIGGER, BETTER AND MORE CONTROVERSIAL, THE INTERNATIONALLY BESTSELLING FREAKQUEL IS HERE IN A SUPER-DELUXE, SUPER-ILLUSTRATED EDITION. Steven Levitt, the original rogue economist, and Stephen Dubner look deeper, question harder and uncover even more hidden truths about our world, from terrorism to shark attacks, cable TV to hurricanes. They ask, among other things- What's a sure-fire way to catch a terrorist? Are people hard-wired for altruism or selfishness? Which cancer does chemotherapy work best for? Why is saving the planet easier than we think? With this illustrated edition, Levitt and Dubner bring alive their unique analysis and storytelling with an explosion of visual evidence to reveal the world in a bold, new way. Seeing is believing . . .

本书作者通过经济学研究方法, 提出了反常思维的一些准则, 以突破常规的思维方式来解决生活中的复杂问题, 彻底改变你解决问题的思路和方法.内容涉及博客与瓶装水有何共同点, 我们只是想帮忙, 手淫者林伯翰和灾星韦恩, 高油价万岁等.

Agents are often better informed than the clients who hire them and may exploit this informational advantage. Real-estate agents, who know much more about the housing market than the typical homeowner, are one example. Because real estate agents receive only a small share of the incremental profit when a house sells for a higher value, there is an incentive for them to convince their clients to sell their houses too cheaply and too quickly. We test these predictions by comparing home sales in which real estate agents are hired by others to sell a home to instances in which a real estate agent sells his or her own home. In the former case, the agent has distorted incentives; in the latter case, the agent wants to pursue the first-best. Consistent with the theory, we find homes owned by real estate agents sell for about 3.7 percent more than other houses and stay on the market about 9.5 days longer, even after controlling for a wide range of housing characteristics. Situations in which the agent's informational advantage is larger lead to even greater distortions.

This article describes a randomized field experiment in which parents were provided financial incentives to engage in behaviors designed to increase early childhood cognitive and executive function skills through a parent academy. Parents were rewarded for attendance at early childhood sessions, completing homework assignments with their children, and for their child's demonstration of mastery on interim assessments. This intervention had large and statistically significant positive impacts on both cognitive and non-cognitive test scores of Hispanics and Whites, but no impact on Blacks. These differential outcomes across races are not attributable to differences in observable characteristics (e.g. family size, mother's age, mother's education) or to the intensity of engagement with the program. Children with above median (pre-treatment) non cognitive scores accrue the most benefits from treatment.

The main results of the paper are as follows: Information in the National Crime Victimization Survey suggests that property crime victimization has become increasingly concentrated on the poor. For instance, in the mid-1970s households with incomes below $25,000 (in 1994 dollars) were actually burglarized slightly less than households with incomes greater than $50,000. By 1994, the poor households were 60 percent more likely to be burglarized than the rich households. For violent crime, however, a different pattern is observed. In the Chicago homicide data, homicide rates at a point in time are generally inversely related to median family income in the community. However, this relationship has substantially weakened over time for blacks and has disappeared completely for whites by 1990. This finding is particularly striking because cross-neighborhood income inequality increased substantially over the time period examined. In other words, the income gap between the richest and poorest communities grew substantially, but the murder gap shrunk.

Which is more dangerous, a gun or a swimming pool? What do schoolteachers and sumo wrestlers have in common? Why do drug dealers still live with their moms? How much do parents really matter? What kind of impact did Roe v. Wade have on violent crime? These may not sound like typical questions for an economist to ask--but Levitt is not a typical economist. He studies the stuff and riddles of everyday life--from cheating and crime to sports and child rearing--and his conclusions regularly turn the conventional wisdom on its head. The authors show that economics is, at root, the study of incentives--how people get what they want, or need, especially when other people want or need the same thing. In this book, they set out to explore the hidden side of everything. If morality represents how we would like the world to work, then economics represents how it actually does work.--From publisher description.