Archive for March, 2008
Tips at Starbucks
Monday, March 31st, 2008A little over a week ago, a superior court ruled that Starbucks was violating California law by compensating shift supervisors out of the tip pool. The judge ordered Starbucks to pay baristas over 100 million dollars in illegally distributed tips. Under California law, employers are not allowed to pay managers out of tips. California Labor […]
Location Matters When it Comes to Trading
Monday, March 31st, 2008From an excellent Economist article surveying talent in the asset management industry: Some quants have a long-term perspective, but many take advantage of the liquidity of modern financial markets to trade very frequently indeed; companies such as AQR, D.E. Shaw, Highbridge and Renaissance often form a substantial portion of daily trading on the New York […]
Social Capital, Entrepreneurship and CB Radios?
Sunday, March 9th, 2008I’m in a group in my economics department that discusses microeconomics literature and research ideas. During our last meeting we discussed “Does Social Capital Promote Industrialization? Evidence From a Rapid Industrialization” by Edward Miguel, Paul Gertler and David Levine. This 2005 paper used evidence from Indonesia to dispute an earlier conclusion by Putnam (1993) that […]
Combating Bias with Bias
Thursday, March 6th, 2008I’m reading Colin Camerer’s overview of Behavioral Economics. My mom doesn’t have an email address, so the following passage made me laugh: Microsoft had a hard time getting its programmers to take customer complaints seriously (despite statistical evidence from customer help-lines), because the programmers thought the software was easy to use and couldn’t believe that […]