Word: levitts
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...analyze Chicago’s test scores, Levitt looked for trends typical of a cheating teacher and developed an algorithm to identify them. Levitt—working with Kennedy School Assistant Professor Brian A. Jacob ’92—flagged classrooms in which students’ exams evinced unusual strings of identical answers in the middle of the test. The researchers found that some teachers were actually altering their students’ tests—erasing wrong answers and filling in the correct bubbles themselves—to boost scores. The study resulted in six teachers being fired...
...Sumo wrestling tournament involves 15 bouts, and a wrestler must win a majority to avoid dropping in the rankings. It doesn’t materially affect him whether he wins 14 matches or eight—just that he emerges with a better-than-even winning percentage. Knowing this, Levitt looked at the last matches in tournaments—when a wrestler with a 13-1 record going into the final round was matched with a 7-7 wrestler on the edge. He found that the 7-7 wrestlers, with more at stake, prevail far more frequently than one would...
Don’t worry though: Levitt finds that most people don’t cheat. He made friends with an entrepreneur named Paul Feldman, who, over eight years, trustingly placed over a million bagels in D.C. offices next to a box asking for an “on your honor” payment. He kept incredibly accurate records, and now we can see how cheating—in the form of “white collar crime”—varies over holidays (stealing increases dramatically over Christmas and decreases on the 4th of July) and during...
...Levitt himself is a heavyweight—of Sumo-sized proportions—in the world of economics. A one-time resident of Wigglesworth H-entry, he excelled academically as an undergrad here, making Phi Beta Kappa his senior year. In 2003, he won the John Bates Clark Medal, awarded to the top American economist under age 40. Past winners include current Harvard faculty members Andrei Shleifer ’82, Martin S. Feldstein ’61, Dale W. Jorgenson, and Lawrence H. Summers...
...link between legalized abortion and crime reduction—generated a torrent of indignant criticism that perhaps Summers would be familiar with. In the early 1980s, crime rates reached an all time high—and then dramatically dropped. One explanation for the drop, argues Levitt, is that the legalization of abortion in the 1970s kept a whole generation of unwanted babies from being born—babies who could have grown into a generation of street criminals 15 to 20 years later. Sounds like a pretty edgy hypothesis, but Levitt backs it up with cold hard numbers. The four...