This morning’s Wall Street Journal contains a round-up of recent research by economists (here, full access gated) about various aspects of football and basketball, focusing on papers being presented at the annual meeting of the American Economics Association in New Orleans, which is going on right now. (The AEA meeting, as it happens, is being held at the same hotel where the LSU players — in town for tonight’s national championship game against TOSUFF (click here for an explanation) — are staying.) Justin Lahart’s article contains, among other things, descriptions of papers (whose authors include the inevitable Steven Levitt and the increasingly inevitable Justin Wolfers) about the advisability of going for it on fourth down (don’t) and the manner in which sports bettors take new information into account (rapidly but in a biased manner). A nice overview, at least for the capitalists among you who subscribe to the Journal.
