C&B Notes

In case you have not seen any of the episodes, we would encourage you to spend a few minutes on John Krasinski’s SomeGoodNews.  Krasinski will lift your spirits and provide a nice antidote to the COVID-19 news flow.  Your whole…

On our recent trip to South America, we were struck by the growth in delivery sales for large QSR brands like McDonald’s and Burger King.  We are interested in whether delivery’s impact on the global restaurant industry will be enduring…

Among the array of advertisements that are competing for consumers’ attention, a car commercial and a furniture concept caught our eye.  BMW’s cheeky tip of the cap to a strong competitor and IKEA’s nostalgic appeal to old TV shows are…

Venture capital investments are subsidizing products and services for consumers.  An analysis of the operations for Lime and Bird, two competing electric scooter rental companies, tells a story of big unit economic losses on these companies’ scooters. Greater fools may…

Promising labor cost savings and condensed building schedules, timber is re-emerging in the commercial construction industry.  “Mass timber” — which is harvested from small, young trees and engineered into large pieces — is being used in new building projects that are paving the way for amended building codes and…

In November, we shared a paper by the Federal Reserve that reported some of its research on the oft-maligned millennial generation. The report’s major thrust: millennials have more in common with other generations than not.  This xkcd comic is a great complement to the Fed’s paper….

For millennia, people including Socrates have been concerned about the behavior of future generations.  A new paper by the Federal Reserve suggests what we have always suspected: millennials have more in common with other generations than not.  To be clear,…

Tyler Vigen’s book, Spurious Correlations, highlights the absurdity of drawing causation from information where only correlation exists.  Reminders that correlation ≠ causation are always useful given our natural instincts to build narratives to explain data and anecdotes we encounter. This spurious correlation…

Taylor Swift recognized that an immediately sold-out show, like a stock price pop on the day of a company’s IPO, meant that she was leaving money on the table for someone else to capture.  Trying to optimize for average ticket…

This remarkable story about Bill Benter, who built an algorithm that cracked the code of horse racing and generated billions in winnings, reminded us of Charlie Munger’s analogy of the stock market as a pari-mutuel betting system.  Both John Kelly,…

Physicist Ruben Meerman shares the fundamentals of weight loss — burn more calories than you digest. Dieting is a field full of crowd-sourced misinformation that influences billions of dollars of consumption and many people’s life expectancies.  Science works.

Academia is not noted for its pithiness when publishing research findings.  Short, concise, and easy-to-understand writing is a dying art.  A new economics journal hopes to provide an option for readers looking for quality over quantity. A backlash is building…