Incentivizing the School Commute
Photo: Mat_the_W We’ve written about bribing kids to get better grades. But what about bribing them to walk or ride their bike to school? A new working paper examines a program in Boulder, Colorado...
View ArticleHigh IQ in Children Linked to Drug Use Later in Life
Photo: iStockphoto A new British study has found that people who scored well on IQ tests as children are more likely to be drug users as adults, especially women. Authors James White and G. David Batty...
View ArticleWant Smarter Kids? Space Them (At Least) Two Years Apart
(iStockphoto) A new study (PDF here) by University of Notre Dame economist Kasey Buckles and graduate student Elizabeth Munnich finds that siblings spaced more than two years apart have higher reading...
View ArticleCash Transfers: The Key to Keeping the World’s Working Kids in School?
A new paper from Eric V. Edmonds and Norbert Schady finds that cash transfer programs in developing countries may keep kids in school and out of the labor force. From the abstract: Poor women with...
View ArticleThe Perils of Technology, iPad Edition
(Photo: FHKE) These days, I read a lot of books on an iPad 2 using the Kindle app. It is for the most part a very good experience, especially for recreational reading. As millions of others have noted,...
View ArticleThe Mathematics of Magic
I don’t particularly like math. I’ve never been a fan of magic either. For some reason, however, when I heard about a new book entitled Magical Mathematics written by two first-rate mathematicians,...
View ArticleHow to Get Your Kid to Do Chores
(Photo: Ruthie Hansen) There’s a new iPad app for parents to incentivize children to do chores. HighScore House! sets up a market for parents and children to assign points to chores and exchange those...
View ArticleMarkets in the Air
(Photo: Christopher Doyle) I stumbled on this nifty business idea, Nanny in the Clouds, to create a market in the air for nannies. Think match.com, but for wanna-be-nannies and parents on airplanes. A...
View ArticleAn Economics Lesson from Law and Order SVU
(Photo: finn) I watched a Law and Order SVU re-run last night, remarkably one that I hadn’t seen before. In the episode, an infant dies of measles contracted from another child whose parents refuse to...
View ArticleEvidence That Myopia Has a Strong Environmental Cause
Time reports on a new study on why Asians have a higher rate of nearsightedness: It has long been thought that nearsightedness is mostly a hereditary problem, but researchers led by Ian Morgan of...
View ArticleWhat’s Wrong With Cash for Grades? A New Marketplace Podcast
(Photo: vxla) Our latest Freakonomics Radio on Marketplace podcast is called “What’s Wrong With Cash for Grades?” (You can download/subscribe at iTunes, get the RSS feed, listen via the media player...
View ArticleSurprising New Findings on Obesity
One of the first Freakonomics Radio podcasts we made was an episode about the (surprisingly tenuous) link between obesity and health problems. A new study in The Journal of the American Medical...
View ArticleHow Is Early-Childhood Intervention Like Compound Interest?
Jason Fletcher, who teaches public health at Yale, has written earlier on the connection between ADHD and crime. (The gist: “children who experience ADHD symptoms face a substantially increased...
View ArticleA Health Upside of Natural Gas
A working paper (PDF; abstract) from economists Resul Cesur, Erdal Tekin, and Aydogan Ulker explores the effects of increased natural gas use on infant mortality: In this paper, we use the variation...
View ArticleTaking on the Myths of Child Mortality
Hans Rosling, whose fantastic animated-data talks have been featured here before, has a new one about child-mortality trends: The video was timed to coincide with the release of Bill Gates‘s 2013...
View ArticleDoes Child Abuse Rise During a Recession?
How do economic conditions affect the incidence of child abuse? While researchers have found that poverty and child abuse are linked, there’s been no evidence that downturns increase abuse. A new...
View ArticleKids Attracted to Medical-Marijuana Candy?
(Photo: Smabs Sputzer A new paper in JAMA Pediatrics finds that a small number of children are showing up in Colorado emergency rooms having unintentionally ingested marijuana. It seems they are...
View ArticleDoes Living With Children Make the Elderly Miserable?
(Photo: tacit requiem) A new working paper (gated) by Angus Deaton and Arthur A. Stone is called “Grandpa and the Snapper: the Wellbeing of the Elderly who Live with Children”: Elderly Americans who...
View ArticleDo Baby Girls Cause Divorce? A New Freakonomics Radio Podcast
(Photo: Marie Smith) Our latest Freakonomics Radio podcast is called “Do Baby Girls Cause Divorce?” (You can subscribe at iTunes, get the RSS feed, or listen via the media player above. You can also...
View ArticleGood News for Child Obesity
We’ve blogged before about America’s rising obesity rate and how to fight it, but the battle may have just gotten a little easier. A new report from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) shows obesity...
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