The Price of Everything - Eduardo Porter [119]
8-10 Prices Rule: The data on cigarette prices comes from the Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids (http://tobaccofreekids.org/reports/prices/, accessed 8/13/2010); and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (http://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/tables/economics/trends/index.htm, accessed 8/13/2010). Illegal drug prices and consumption drawn from Arthur Fries, Robert W. Anthony, Andrew Cseko, Jr., Carl C. Gaither, and Eric Schulman, “The Price and Purity of Illicit Drugs: 1981-2007,” Institute for Defense Analysis for the Office of National Drug Control Policy (http://www.whitehousedrugpolicy.gov/publications/price_purity/price_purity07.pdf. , accessed 08/08/2010). The analysis relating gas prices and housing draws from Edward L. Glaeser and Matthew E. Kahn, “Sprawl and Urban Growth,” NBER Working Paper, May 2003; and Census Bureau, American Housing Survey of the United States, 2007 and 1997 editions (found at http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/housing/ahs/nationaldata.html, accessed 08/13/2010). The comparison of urban patterns in Moscow with those of other cities draws from Alain Bertaud and Renaud Bertrand, “Cities Without Land Markets, Location and Land Use in the Socialist City,” the World Bank, Policy Research Working Paper 477, June 1995, in Journal of Urban Economics, Vol. 41, No. 1, January 1997, pp. 137-151.
11-12 When Prices Misfire: The anecdote about incentives and births in Australia comes from Joshua Gans and Andrew Leigh, “Born on the First of July: An (Un)natural Experiment in Birth Timing,” Journal of Public Economics, Vol. 93, 2009. Data on the window tax come from the Wolverhampton Archives (http://www.wolverhamptonarchives.dial.pipex.com/windowtax.htm, accessed 08/13/2010). The analysis of the effects of the 55-mph speed limit draws from Paul Grimes, “Practical Traveler: The 55-m.p.h. Speed Limit,” New York Times, December 26, 1982; and M. C. Jensen and W. H. Meckling, “The Nature of Man,” Journal of Applied Corporate Finance, Vol. 7, No. 2, Summer 1994, pp. 4-19. The data on wages and gas prices was drawn from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Energy Information Administration. Data on gas mileage was drawn from the Environmental Protection Agency’s 1974 Gas Mileage Guide for Car Buyers.
15-22 The Price of Things: The experiment on placebo effects is found in Dan Ariely, Baba Shiv, Ziv Carmon, and Rebecca Waber, “Commercial Features of Placebo and Therapeutic Efficacy,” Journal of the American Medical Association , Letters, Vol. 299, No. 9, 2008, pp. 1016-1017. The relation between lap-dancer tips and menstrual cycles is drawn from Geoffrey Miller, Joshua Tybur, and Brent Jordan, “Ovulatory Cycle Effects on Tip Earnings by Lap Dancers: Economic Evidence for Human Estrus?,” Evolution and Human Behavior, Vol. 28, 2007, pp. 375-381. The impact of Sesame Street characters on children’s preferences is found in The Sesame Workshop, “If Elmo Eats Broccoli, Will Kids Eat It Too?,” Press Release, September 20, 2005. Evidence on people’s willingness to travel across town to save twenty dollars comes from “Conversation Between Economists Glenn Lowry and Sendhil Mullainathan,” Bloggingheads TV, March 22, 2010 (http://bloggingheads.tv/diavlogs/26877, accessed 08/13/2010). Wine preferences are drawn from Eileen Brooks, “Products and Prejudice: Measuring Country-of-Origin Bias in U.S. Wine Imports,” University of California Santa Cruz Center for International Economics Working Paper, 2003; Hilke Plassmann, John O’Doherty, Baba Shiv, and Antonio Rangel, “Marketing Actions Can Modulate Neural Representations of Experienced Pleasantness,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Vol. 105, No. 3, January 2008, pp. 1050-1054; and Robin Goldstein, Johan Almenberg, Anna Dreber, John W. Emerson, Alexis Herschkowitsch, and Jacob Katz, “Do More Expensive Wines Taste Better? Evidence from a Large Sample of Blind Tastings,” Stockholm School of Economics Working Paper, April 2008. The story about pricey license plates in Dubai comes from Margaret Corker, “Read My License Plate: