Boring Economists?

Who says economists are boring?

Through a rash of books over the last few years, a variety of economists have used the tools of the trade to dabble beyond more traditional areas of analyses. For many economists, economics is not just about fiscal and monetary policies, labor and capital markets, industry assessments and such any more.

Apparently, the American Economic Association’s meeting over this past weekend generated some non-traditional lines of economic inquiry. Check out a couple of interesting reports.

The Wall Street Journal today noted the following:

Sports and academia don't always mix. But a small band of economists are carefully examining sports and sports betting because of the unique opportunity it gives them to see how people respond to incentives: The games are straightforward, the participants are intimately familiar with the rules, and the desire to win is intense.

"We can use sports to answer this interesting economic question: Do people behave rationally?" says Christopher Adams, a Federal Trade Commission economist.

This weekend, Mr. Adams challenged a 2006 paper by David Romer of the University of California at Berkeley that had argued football coaches aren't always rational in deciding to punt on fourth down…

Other economists looked to sports wagering for insight into the age-old question of how effectively markets respond to new information.

And The New York Times reported:

Are movies like “Hannibal” and the remake of “Halloween,” which serve up murder and mutilation as routine fare, actually making the nation safer?

A paper presented by two researchers over the weekend to the annual meeting of the American Economic Association here challenges the conventional wisdom, concluding that violent films prevent violent crime by attracting would-be assailants and keeping them cloistered in darkened, alcohol-free environs.

Instead of fueling up at bars and then roaming around looking for trouble, potential criminals pass the prime hours for mayhem eating popcorn and watching celluloid villains slay in their stead.

“You’re taking a lot of violent people off the streets and putting them inside movie theaters,” said one of the authors of the study, Gordon Dahl, an economist at the University of California, San Diego. “In the short run, if you take away violent movies, you’re going to increase violent crime.”

Substantive? Perhaps. Interesting? Yes. Provoking debate? Absolutely. So again, who says economists are boring?