Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…That’s just something, I think, coming from a science background from childhood, I really appreciated the clarity, for instance, of scientific experiments where you can say with precision that this is what we think happened when you changed something. Having that interest from a young age, I want to be able to explain my findings to my parents or my wife, who’s a neuroscientist, and so forth. So that type of focus is something that distinguishes our research group, and trying to think in innovative ways about problems that people have worked on in the past. For instance, there’s been a lot of work on neighborhood effects for 30 years. Our group by no means is the first to think about neighborhood effects. Where we’ve tried to push forward a little bit is thinking about the mechanisms through which neighborhoods affect kids and showing that, in particular, every year of exposure during childhood seems really critical, something that struck us as being an intuitive hypothesis, but then figuring out how to document that clearly in the data, and that has led the field to be able to now look at neighborhoods in a very different way than people were looking at in the past. We’ll get back to that paper, but let’s briefly talk about two of your earliest hit papers that are still, I think, your two most heavily cited papers. The first one of those is on salience of taxes and prices. One of the results in this paper — there’s more to it than this — but consumers are less discouraged by the price when the price takes the form of a sales tax added on rather than when the price is embedded in a single net total price up front, correct? That’s right.…

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