Hospital mergers

This opinion in the WSJ argues that mergers between hospitals create value. 

Summary from James Dearden: "Stand-alone hospitals have too few patients to thrive in the new era of population health management. The opinion piece addresses the three rationales for horizontal mergers: economies of scale or scope, improvements in the quality of service, and increased market power."

Scotland’s ‘No’ Vote: A Loss for Pollsters and a Win for Betting Markets - NYTimes.com

This article from the NYT reports that prediction markets out-performed pollsters in Scotland's vote for independence.

Robert Griffin III and the Sunk Cost Fallacy

This opinion from the NYT argues that the Redskins may be falling prey to the sunk cost fallacy. 

Fwd: (2014Fall) PRIN OF ECON - MICRO: Median Earnings by Major

The bottom of this article has a nice search feature that gives you the # of majors, median, 75th and 25th percentile earnings, and the % working in jobs, broken into three categories that I don't fully understand. The medians for Economics and Business Economics are $47,000 and $46,000 respectively.  Here are some other medians: Petroleum Eng. - $110,000, Finance - $47,000, Accounting - $45,000, Computer and Information Systems - $45,000, Psychology - $41,000, General Business - $40,000, Business Mgmt. and Admin. - $38,000, Marketing and Marketing Research - $38,000, Political Science and Government - $38,000, History - $34,000, and Social Work - $30,000.

" These figures don't necessarily mean that switching majors will bring a big financial boost. Economics majors, for example, earn $7,000 — 18 percent — more on average than "general business" majors, but economics is also generally considered a harder and more prestigious major, and therefore tends to draw more top students; it's unlikely all those business majors could have gotten themselves a $7,000 raise just by switching to econ. Similarly, majoring in astrophysics won't net a $62,000 salary for someone who flunks Calculus 101. And of course, if a huge surge of students really did decide to follow the dollar signs into petroleum engineering, the glut of supply would likely drive down wages."

Mixed strategies

Mixed strategies are hard to implement: http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20140905-how-to-win-at-almost-everything.

Law Students Respond Predictably to Lower Tuition

This article in the WSJ describes the effects of lower tuition charged by some law schools. Guess what - education in law obeys the law of demand.

Online Learning @ Stanford

This opinion in the WSJ describes John Taylor's experience teaching an online course at Stanford. 

One effect of rent control

This article from Priceonomics estimates that landlords in San Francisco would break even if they paid tenants $130,000 to move out of their apartments. How? The landlord  of a rent-controlled apartment can sell it as a condo or raise the rent to the market price only if the current tenant moves out.