A Couple More Econ Ideas

- Announcers talk all the time about "icing the kicker" - calling a time out just before the opposing team's kicker is going to kick a field goal at the end of the game. I'd be curious to look into whether it actually has any effect. It would be relatively straightforward if you could get your hands on a good dataset: look at situations where a coach did ice a kicker, ones where they could have but chose not to (I think this is rare), and ones where they did not have a time out and so could not. Compare "ice" vs "did not have a timeout to ice" and consider whether it affected performance.

- Along the same lines, basketball coaches very often call timeout when their team is doing badly over the last few minutes. The analysis is not as clear but you could look at something similar.

These are in the general category of "test out the conventional wisdom from some sport." I think this would be pretty interesting, and I think there would be decent interest from economists and the general public. Economists are going to be a lot more interested if the result is "teams are throwing millions of dollars (via winning fewer games) by making bad decisions" rather than "announcers are stupid."

Another Scotland Post

In most of the pubs I was in in Scotland there was no music being played (except maybe live music). In the US it's almost a guarantee that there will be music being played or possibly the sound from a TV. In a busier pub in Scotland, it's nice: there is a constant buzz of conversation around you so it doesn't feel that different from an American bar with music, but it is easier to talk to the people around you. In a quieter pub, it feels more like everyone is more in the same social space because it's very easy to talk to other people.

This can be good or bad, and in one bar that Amanda and I were in, it was simultaneously good and bad as a drunk Scottish guy talked quasi-coherently to us until we finished our drinks and left. I was actually thrilled to talk to an odd drunk Scottish guy, but if I lived in Scotland it would probably get pretty old.