Researchers at the University of Barcelona have demonstrated that a combination of caffeine and glucose (think coffee and pastry) “improves cognitive performance in terms of sustained attention and working memory by increasing the efficiency of the areas of the brain responsible for these two functions.” Earlier research from the same team also “revealed improvements in […]
Kris Warner and I have a new paper (pdf) out today on the impact that the large and growing population of ex-offenders has on the US labor market. First, we estimate the size of the ex-offender population. Based on several different methods, we conclude that there are about 6 million ex-prisoners and about 13 million […]
USA Today had a big, front-page story yesterday reporting that the “number of federal workers earning $150,000 or more a year has soared tenfold in the past five years and doubled since President Obama took office.” The piece provides a lot of useful numbers, but is short on context. As written, headlined, and positioned in […]
Greg Kaplan and Sam Schulhofer-Wohl of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis have an interesting new paper that suggests that much of the recently reported decline in interstate migration may simply be a statistical artifact. In particular, the recession, at least through 2009, has not reduced mobility more than would have been predicted based on […]
Some time last week, the company that hosts my website received a sternly worded letter from Kilpatrick Stockton LLP, Attorneys at Law, instructing the data center to remove a file on my web site from their server. The file that the lawyers wanted taken down was a pdf version of a report called “US Banks: […]
