New Releases by Steven D Levitt

"Freakonomics", le best-seller du New York Times, a changé la manière dont nous voyons le monde en explorant la face cachée des choses. "Pensez comme un freak", le nouveau livre de Steven D. Levitt et Stephen J. Dubner, est leur ouvrage le plus révolutionnaire à ce jour. Ils savent toujours aussi bien raconter une histoire, tout en avançant une analyse non conventionnelle. Ils nous font partager leur manière de penser et nous proposent une nouvelle approche pour résoudre les problèmes. Les sujets qu'ils nous proposent vont du monde des affaires à la philanthropie, en passant par le sport et la politique, et ils ont tous pour but de nous donner les clés pour renouveler notre manière de penser. Vous découvrirez les secrets du plus gros mangeur de hot-dogs, la raison pour laquelle un médecin australien a avalé des bactéries dangereuses et pourquoi les arnaqueurs nigérians prennent soin de dire qu'ils viennent du Nigeria dans leurs courriels. Levitt et Dubner voient le monde comme personne. Et maintenant, vous aussi vous pouvez adopter leur point de vue. Il n'y a jamais eu penseurs plus iconoclastes et divertissants.

La 4e de couverture indique : "Il y a 10 ans, le monument "Freakonomics" atterrissait dans les rayons des librairies. Quoi de mieux pour célébrer cet anniversaire que de rassembler les meilleurs des 8 000 posts du blog économique freakonomics.com – le plus lu au monde – dans un seul volume ? Steven Levitt et Stephen Dubner se sont donc retroussé les manches et les ont tous passés au crible pour n’en garder que la crème de la crème. Vous découvrirez, entre autres, dans cet ouvrage les sujets sur lesquels les gens mentent le plus souvent et pourquoi, le meilleur moyen de diminuer le nombre de tués par balle, les raisons pour imposer une taxe sur le sexe, mais aussi, le meilleur moment pour cambrioler une banque (en un mot : jamais, le retour sur investissement est atroce). Vous en apprendrez également beaucoup sur les idiosyncrasies et les passions de Levitt et Dubner, des jeux d’argent au golf, en passant par le backgammon et l’abolition du penny. Surprenant et érudit, éloquent et plein d’esprit, À quelle heure braquer la banque ? démontre le talent des auteurs qui a fait de Freakonomics un succès international."

Japanese edition of Think Like a Freak: The Authors of Freakonomics Offer to Retrain Your Brain. This follow up of the bestselling and amazingly easy to comprehend books on economics, the Freakonomics series, again helps readers approach life in a more out of the box and creative way. In Japanese. Annotation copyright Tsai Fong Books, Inc. Distributed by Tsai Fong Books, Inc.

CHI edition of SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner challenges with its extraordinary Vietnamesews and unique perspectives on the hidden side of everything again. In CHI. Distributed by Tsai Fong Books, Inc.

This study presents an overview of modern field experiments and their usage in economics. Our discussion focuses on three distinct periods of field experimentation that have influenced the economics literature. The first might well be thought of as the dawn of quot;fieldquot; experimentation: the work of Neyman and Fisher, who laid the experimental foundation in the 1920s and 1930s by conceptualizing randomization as an instrument to achieve identification via experimentation with agricultural plots. The second, the large-scale social experiments conducted by government agencies in the mid-twentieth century, moved the exploration from plots of land to groups of individuals. More recently, the nature and range of field experiments has expanded, with a diverse set of controlled experiments being completed outside of the typical laboratory environment. With this growth, the number and types of questions that can be explored using field experiments has grown tremendously. After discussing these three distinct phases, we speculate on the future of field experimental methods, a future that we envision including a strong collaborative effort with outside parties, most importantly private entities.

"Steven D. Levitt and co-author Stephen J. Dubner 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 Freakonomics, they set out to explore the hidden side of...well, everything. The inner workings of a crack gang. The truth about real-estate agents. The myths of campaign finance. The telltale marks of a cheating schoolteacher. The secrets of the Ku Klux Klan."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

In most settings, it is difficult to measure discrimination, and even more challenging to distinguish between competing theories of discrimination (taste-based versus information-based). Using contestant voting behavior on the television game show Weakest Link, one can in principle empirically address both of these questions. On the show, contestants answer questions and vote off other players, competing for a winner-take-all prize. In early rounds, strategic incentives encourage voting for the weakest competitors. In later rounds, the incentives reverse, and the strongest competitors become the logical target. Controlling for other observable characteristics including the number of correct answers thus far, both theories of discrimination predict that in early rounds, excess votes will be made against groups targeted for discrimination. In later rounds, however, taste-based models predict continued excess votes, whereas statistical discrimination predicts fewer votes against the target group. Empirically, I find some evidence of information-based discrimination towards Hispanics (i.e., other players perceive them as having low ability) and taste-based discrimination against older players (i.e., other players treat them with animus). There is little in the data to suggest discrimination against women and Blacks

Over the last two decades the punitiveness of the juvenile justice system has declined" substantially relative to the adult courts. During that same time period juvenile violent crime" rates have grown almost twice as quickly as adult crime rates. This paper examines the degree to" which those two empirical observations are related, finding that changes in relative punishments" can account for 60 percent of the differential growth rates in juvenile and adult violent crime" between 1978 and 1993. Juvenile offenders appear to be at least as responsive to criminal" sanctions as adults. Moreover, sharp changes in criminal involvement with the transition from" the juvenile to the adult court suggest that deterrence, rather than simply incapacitation important role. There does not, however, appear to be a strong relationship between the" punitiveness of the juvenile justice system that a cohort faces and the extent of criminal" involvement for that cohort later in life.

Previous empirical studies have typically uncovered little evidence that police reduce crime. One problem with those studies is a failure to adequately deal with the simultaneity between police and crime: while police may or may not reduce crime, there is little doubt that expenditures on police forces are an increasing function of the crime rate. In this study, the timing of mayoral and gubernatorial elections is used to identify the effect of police on crime. This paper first demonstrates that increases in the size of police forces disproportionately occur in mayoral and gubernatorial election years, a relationship that had previously gone undocumented. After controlling for changes in government spending on other social programs, there is little reason to think that elections will be otherwise correlated with crime, making elections ideal instruments. Using a panel of large U.S. cities from 1970-1992, police are shown to reduce crime for six of the seven crime categories examined. Each additional police officer is estimated to eliminate eight to ten serious crimes. Existing estimates of the costs of crime suggest that the social benefit of reduced crime is approximately $100,000 per officer per year, implying that the current number of police is below the optimal level.