As an NFL fan, (and a fan of the Seattle Seahawks in particular) I occasionally find myself watching football with my dad, and whenever I do, the accusation inevitably creeps in that the referees are biased in the way that they make penalty calls – specifically that for a given illegal action, a penalty flag will be thrown against the Seahawks much more frequently than against the opposing team, even when the offending action is performed at a similar rate by both teams. Personally, I’m not good enough at spotting every penalty on the field to say with confidence whether or not this is the case, and to be honest, my suspicion is that this feeling of one’s own team being unfairly persecuted is one harbored by most sports fans regardless of the team they root for. It occurs to me though, that as a data scientist, this sports fan is uniquely qualified to actually grab some data and attempt to vet this theory as it applies to my own team and be able to say with some objective numbers how well founded these suspicions may be.  

The accusation at the heart of this study really has to do with penalties that are not called, for which there is no record, which makes this claim very hard to definitively confirm or refute. However, data on called penalties is published and publicly available, and through thoughtful analysis of the penalties that were called, we can at least see if there is any evidence of a bias towards calling penalties against certain teams more often than others.

My movie viewing for this week was The Big Short, it wasn’t quite what I thought going into the movie (it was billed as some sort of financial heist movie), but I thought it was very well done. For anyone who is interested, it came off as a witty documentary about the financial collapse that caused the Great Recession with A-list actors portraying the key players that the film follows through the collapse. It does a fairly good job of explaining how the collapse came about in a non-technical way, and without losing audience attention in the process. I recommend the film to anyone who is curious to learn more about the causes of the recession, or even just looking to see an entertaining film and learn something in the process.

As an economist who was learning his trade during the later years of the recession and the period following it, I am somewhat familiar with the causes of the collapse and therefore didn’t learn anything too new myself, although the film did offer some insights on the events as they unfolded by way of viewing them through the eyes of the key characters of the film who were investigating the legitimacy of the real estate market in order to ascertain whether there was in fact a bubble in the market. The biggest take away for me was an issue regarding the credit rating agencies, whose complete failure to accurately report the riskiness of mortgage backed securities as well as derivatives of those securities was a big factor in the crisis. I had been familiar with this failure in reporting being a key factor that allowed the crisis to form the way it had prior to viewing the film, but the film presents an alternate explanation as to why this failure may have come to pass than what I had previously heard. Continue reading →

Its been a while since I’ve published anything here so I thought I’d take a little bit of time while I have it to throw out an update, and let anyone who is curious know that I have not in fact fallen off of the face of the Earth.

What have I been up to you may ask? I have had a research project in the works for some time now which I hope to be sharing with you soon, however it has been slow in coming due to a scarcity of data, a more abstract concept and increasing demands for my attention elsewhere. In addition to increasing demands from my day job I have also taken up learning to program in the software programming language of Python, which as someone who does not come from an IT background has been somewhat of a challenge and has taken up much of my free time as of late.

While I expect to remain entrenched in the process of picking up the finer nuances of the Python language for at least the next month or so, I hope also to be able to set aside some time to bring some more updates to this somewhat neglected site in the coming weeks on topics both familiar and new. So for anyone curious to learn about what the U.S. economy can be expected to do in the beginning of 2016, or about the equitability of purchasing naming rights to major league sports venues, stay tuned! It (hopefully) won’t be long.

For those who haven’t been following the Greek default situation that has developed over the past few weeks, grexit means Greek exit: from the Euro, and likely the EU as well. Over the last week or so negotiations have been held in order to try to keep Greece from missing a 1.72 billion euro payment and therefore defaulting on its loans from the International Monetary Fund, but they have broken down in large part thanks to the current Greek prime minister who was voted into office in January running on a platform of among other things saying no to national austerity. It seems as though on this front Mr. Tsipras has managed to keep his word, but his country is so far not looking the better for it. The recently elected prime minister was betting that the rest of the EU would fold and bail them out in the name of keeping the country from leaving the EU and setting a precedent regarding ejection from the union that could lead to a further collapse of the union down the road. This turned out to be unfounded however as leaders from the rest of the European states stuck to their guns about conditions regarding a bailout and no deal was reached. Now Greece has defaulted on its loan, its credit status has been downgraded, and it may now be facing ejection from the Euro and with it the EU. A vote took place on Sunday by Greek citizens on weather or not to accept reform and fiscal adjustment programs designed by the rest of Europe to move Greece in the direction of being in a position to feasibly start paying back more of the debt it owes to the rest of Europe. The reform plan had already been officially taken off of the table by that point amid the negotiation break down so rather than having any sort of an actionable outcome either way, what it basically came down to was that a yes vote would be a show of good faith by the Greek people that they are willing to tighten their belts and do what needs to be done to pay back what they owe as a nation. This is not what the world got, which shouldn’t be a big surprise in retrospect given that this is the same outcome of saying no that prevailed in moving Mr. Tsipras into office in January. Continue reading →

Hello, and welcome to curious economist. I am a little new to blogging and have heard that a good way to start is to lead off with an introductory post, so here it is. This blog will focus on the process/results of my independent research which will largely consist of forecasting and statistical studies focused on answering specific questions. I may occasionally talk about economic issues pertaining to application of theory as well, in order to keep things going while I am in the process of conducting the research that will go into the primary posts. Because data gathering and analysis can take some time, and I have a day job to deal with as well, I’m not yet sure how often the regular posts will come, but it’s my hope that I’ll be able to find a happy balance for my time use that won’t leave the site bereft of updates for too long at a time.

As for the content of my research, I don’t really have a specific field of interest so the topics will likely vary and include anything that catches my attention and has sufficient publicly available data to work with. It’s my hope that I can drum up enough questions to answer that are if not interesting then at least relevant that you will be interested in the answers I find as well, and that the site won’t get stale.

So, that being said, let’s start asking some questions and see what interesting things we can find. If anyone out there has any research suggestions or questions about the work I’ve done, don’t hesitate to leave it in the comments.