- Why did DuPont market nylon primarily as a silk substitute for women's stockings in 1940?
Financial and Economic Crises
Episodes of financial collapse, panic, and recession.
- Why did Bernard Lovell face possible bankruptcy and criminal proceedings just as the telescope was completed?
- How did Steinbeck's upbringing in the Salinas Valley shape the subjects of The Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men?
- What historical events does The Grapes of Wrath dramatize about the Dust Bowl migration to California?
- What is the permanent income hypothesis and how did it reshape economists' understanding of consumption?
- What is regulatory capture, and why does Stigler argue that regulated industries end up controlling the agencies meant to restrain them?
- Why do individual consumers have less incentive to influence regulatory outcomes than the industries being regulated?
- What masks of Mexican identity does El laberinto de la soledad examine, and why does Paz treat them like an anthropologist studying his own culture?
- How did Harry Markowitz's 1952 paper show that combining uncorrelated assets can lower a portfolio's overall risk?
- What did Coase's 1960 paper argue about the assignment of legal rights and bargaining outcomes?
- What was the traditional principle of unlimited liability that Lloyd's of London 'Names' agreed to?
- What happened when heavy losses in the early 1990s tested the Names' willingness to pay?
- What went wrong with Pepsi-Cola Philippines' 1992 number-matching lottery?
- What did Ravi Batra's 1987 book predict, and did it come true?
- What trading error did Juan Pablo Dávila make at Codelco, and how did trying to fix it make things worse?
- How much did Dávila's mistake end up costing Chile's economy?
- What does the Chilean verb 'davilar' mean, and how did it enter the language?
- How did John Harsanyi extend Nash's framework to games of incomplete information?
- How did Nick Leeson hide £827 million in losses at Barings Bank before the scheme collapsed?
- What kind of interest-rate bets caused Orange County to file for the largest municipal bankruptcy of its time?
- What do the Barings and Orange County cases have in common as lessons about leverage?
- What happened to Long-Term Capital Management, and why is that ironic given the laureates' work?
- How did Amartya Sen show that famines can occur even while food is still being exported from the affected region?
- What legal ambiguities did a flame-based anti-theft device raise for its inventors?
- Why does it remain unresolved whether the remediation effort was necessary or the threat was overstated?
- Why did economists later question whether the eurozone actually met Mundell's criteria?
- Why is the absence of a Y2K disaster not proof the risk was overstated?
- How did Enron use off-balance-sheet partnerships to hide debt and inflate earnings?
- How did WorldCom's capitalisation of ordinary operating expenses inflate its reported profits?
- What did Karl Schwärzler's scheme actually let corporations rent for events?
- What could clients customize when they rented the Principality of Liechtenstein?
- Roughly how much did it cost to rent the entire country for a night?
- How did Lal Bihari come to be officially declared dead in India?
- What is the Association of Dead People, and why did Bihari found it?
- How does Clocky's wheeled design solve the problem of the ordinary snooze button?
- What narrative template do advance-fee email scams typically follow?
- Which real historical figures did the committee cite as recurring characters in these emails?
- Why did the Ig Nobel committee frame the scam emails as a literary genre rather than simply as fraud?
- What alternative bank security measures does the net device compare to?
- Why does private information make designing effective economic rules so difficult?
- How was the confusion eventually discovered and corrected within the police service?
- What range of denominations did the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe print during the hyperinflation crisis?
- How did Iceland's three major banks grow to hold assets nearly ten times the country's GDP?
- What happened to Iceland's economy when its banking sector collapsed in late 2008?
- Why did the Ig Nobel committee choose to award the Economics prize to Iceland's bank executives?
- Which financial institutions were honoured by the 2010 Ig Nobel Economics prize and why?
- How did mortgage-backed derivatives fail despite being marketed as low-risk?
- What did the GAO's award-winning report actually recommend?
- Why did the Ig Nobel committee consider a government report worthy of a Literature prize?
- How did Robert Shiller's research on asset bubbles seem to contradict Fama's findings?
- How can markets be both hard to beat in the short run and wrong over the long run?
- Which illegal activities did ISTAT fold into Italy's official national accounts?
- Why did the old regulatory toolkit of breaking up firms and capping prices fail for two-sided platforms?
- What is mechanism design and how did Tirole apply it to industry-specific regulation?
- How does platform economics explain why a firm might subsidise one group of customers to attract another?
- What is brand personality theory, and how did researchers test its limits using rocks?
- How does Hart's incomplete contracts theory explain who should own assets when agreements can't cover every contingency?
- What percentage of people were found to skip product instruction manuals entirely?
- What does the manual-skipping tendency imply for how products should be designed?
- What does it mean for ideas to be 'non-rival' in Paul Romer's growth theory?
- What correlation did Watkins's team find between a country's income inequality and how often its people kiss romantically?
- What is the 'winner's curse' in an auction with a common but uncertain value, like oil drilling rights?
- What did the simulation find about the relationship between talent and ultimate career success?
- What structural mismatch in banking did Diamond and Dybvig's 1983 model formalize?
- How can depositors' mere belief that a bank will fail actually cause that failure?
- What did Bernanke's research show about the role bank failures played in deepening the Great Depression?
- How did Bernanke apply Diamond and Dybvig's theoretical insights during his time as Federal Reserve chairman in 2008?