That’s how PMSBuddy.com pitches itself. To wit:

PMSBuddy.com is a free service created with a single goal in mind: to keep you aware of when your wife, girlfriend, mother, sister, daughter, or any other women in your life are closing in on “that time of the month” - when things can get intense for what [...]

Two weeks ago, I invited readers to submit quotations for which they wanted me to try to trace the origins, using The Yale Book of Quotations and more recent research by me. Dozens responded via comments or e-mails. I am responding as best I can, a couple per week.

The details are tedious and inscrutable. There’s often no obvious link between cause and effect. It will drag on probably twice as long as you want it to.

These are just a few of the ways The Bailout Game mirrors our dreary market slowdown.

For the more academically inclined among you, Princeton economist Angus Deaton offers his appraisal of the state of development economics.
Deaton writes:

The wholesale abandonment in American graduate schools of price theory in favor of infinite horizon intertemporal optimization and game theory has not been a favorable development for young empiricists.
Empiricists and theorists [...]

After the 9/11 terrorist attack on New York, a lot of people wrote or called to ask if my family and I were O.K. Some of these people were casual acquaintances at best but, for many of them, I was the only person they knew who lived in New York. Their concern was extremely moving [...]

At the annual meeting of the American Economic Association, its president announced that the Clark Medal, presented biennially to the top economist under age 40 (former winner Steve Levitt), will henceforth be given annually.
Along with other medals, this will mean that we give up to four medals each year. Sounds like a lot, [...]

As you may have read, the Obama administration is moving toward giving California approval to cut greenhouse gas emissions by mandating better fuel economy.
The California regulations should mean 40 percent more miles per gallon for new cars starting in 2016. The good thing is that the innovations that can make this happen are not [...]

The answer to that question is almost certainly “no,” but a new study that is getting lots of media attention does claim that there is a correlation between having an uncommon name and being more likely to show up in the juvenile justice system. The study finds this relationship to be true both for blacks and whites.

The latest recession indicator: more people are searching Google for “coupons” than for “Britney Spears.” And it’s not that Britney is getting less popular. By this measure, the recession began in March 2008. Check out the full time series, here.
(Hat tip: Google’s Chief Economist, Hal Varian, via my co-author Bo Cowgill.)

What happens when Monty Python puts its videos on YouTube for free? It increases DVD sales by 23,000 percent. (Earlier)
How much are your friends worth? (Earlier)
It’s like online dating, except you’re seeking cities. (Earlier)
Will Wilkinson asks: are economists clueless? (HT: Jarrod Hunt) (Earlier)

For anyone who read, even casually, about the welfare wars of the 1990’s, it seems strange that there is so little conversation, political or otherwise, about the topic these days. That may soon be changing, of course, as the proposed Obama stimulus plan attempts to direct money toward the poorest segments of our population.

My former student Sean Harper has put together a nifty little web site, truecostofcredit.com, that allows you to see how much merchants are charged when you use your credit card.
I was surprised at how high the fees were. For instance, in this example of a Mastercard, when you buy a $1.50 pack of [...]

For the past month or so, I’ve made it a habit to ask fellow economists how the response to the financial crisis has been improved by the past few decades of macroeconomic theorizing. Dozens of conversations later, I don’t have much to report.
Today’s big question is whether government spending can pull us out of this [...]

Mario Batali is one of the best-known chefs/entrepreneurs in the world. During college, at Rutgers, he double majored: Spanish theater (who knew?) and economics. He was good enough to submit to our FREAK-Quently Asked Questions (past entries here).

An FAQ with Mario Batali:

Most parents have difficulty deciding how much of the “bad stuff” (war, death, etc.) they should tell their kids about, or when they’re old enough to hear it.

New research from Ulrike Malmendier of the University of California and Stefan Nagel of Stanford identifies another kid-sensitive subject parents might want to avoid for a while: the financial crisis.