Providing Answers
By Meghan Laska
Wharton’s Joel Waldfogel’s Views on New
Economic Research—and Why Free
Markets Aren’t Always Best
Can watching soap operas
improve women’s rights in
developing countries?
This is just one of the diverse topics that
business and public policy professor Joel
Waldfogel tackles in a monthly column he
writes for Slate.com. “I think of myself as
an empirical economist who works on industrial economics and law and economics, and then I have interests that are just for
fun,” says Waldfogel. In the column, which
falls under the “fun” category, Waldfogel
typically explores new economic research
that is both interesting and provides compelling answers to a real question.
This ability to provide such answers,
whether for Slate.com readers or scholars and executives looking for provocative
new ideas, is one reason colleagues across
the country describe Waldfogel as “one of
America’s most interesting economists.”
The chair of the Business and Public Policy
Department since 2006, Waldfogel’s current academic interests tend to fall into two
main categories: the effects of agglomera-
tion on product availability and intellectual property piracy issues. He also recently
finished a book, The Tyranny of the Market:
Why You Can’t Always Get What You Want,
which debates long-held arguments that free
markets are best for everyone.
For his Slate.com column, Waldfogel
pores over recent working papers in eco-
nomics and asks himself how many of those
papers would interest a general audience. “My job is to take it and translate it in a way
that’s faithful to the research, but write about
it in a way that is interesting and hits on
some important topics,” he says.
The soap opera paper, he says, is a great
example. Titled “TV is Good for You,” the
August 2007 column discussed a new study
that showed that cable television—which
has recently come to remote Indian villag-
es and airs Indian soap operas—was helping
to shape women’s attitudes there in positive
ways with regard to autonomy, violence toward women and male gender preferences in
children. “The soap opera study was fascinating to write about. If those results hold up
then that is a really important finding that
could help women’s rights in India,” he says.
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