The decreasing returns to travelling

Jackie Lee is a traveller. While in Europe for his master’s degree, he flew to all easyjet destinations from Geneva. When in Bergen, enjoying the view of the amazing fjord and the UNESCO World Heritage city, he noted: “I don’t get impressed anymore by these things that are supposed to be gorgeous. I travelled too much”.
There are indeed decreasing returns to travelling, at least for some of us. Here's a way to grow old and keep on having fun travelling. It's all about technological progress in the pleasure production function.

Corruption survey

Of the economics students that took the survey (39 of them):

• 21% would prefer to work in a bank than a development agency;
• 73% favour relatively high wages for public officials;
• 94% would work for an International Organization;
• 23% think we should accept corruption as a fact of life.

Not surprisingly, people who prefer banks to development agencies are completely against high salaries in government.

People with lower grades tend to prefer banking and are more likely to tolerate corruption as they also come from more corrupt countries (according to Transparency International).

Finally, people from corrupt countries seem to tolerate corruption more, being more likely to accept it as a part of life. Furthermore, they would rather work in development agencies.

None of these results are significant.

The winner of the free lunch is Tadashi Ito.

Economics Departments Rankings

I made a new ranking based on where prolific researchers did their PhD, not where they teach now, and based on citations, not publications. The methodology is explained here and the data can be found here. The top 10 is:

MIT
Harvard
Chicago
Princeton
Yale
Stanford
Minnesota
Carnegie Mellon
Berkeley
LSE