Moviegoers love the intricacies of a crime all the more when it's for a good cause..

Procrastination also can be a way of self-handicapping: if you don't do a great job, you can always say to yourself, "If I'd only started sooner, I'd….

Sometimes even a smart crowd will make a mistake..

The important thing about groupthink is that it works not so much by censoring dissent as by making dissent seem somehow improbable..

Political risk is hard to manage because so much comes down to the personal choices of policymakers, whether prime ministers or heads of central bank….

We assume that good-looking people are smarter and more effective than they really are, and that homely people are the reverse..

Academics, who work for long periods in a self-directed fashion, may be especially prone to putting things off: surveys suggest that the vast majorit….

On Wall Street, fraudulent schemes tend to thrive during economic booms, and to blow up when times turn tough..

What an economy really wants, after all, is not more investment per se but better investment. It wants capital to flow to companies that will create ….

Defense contractors are able to reap tremendous profits while rarely confronting the risks for which those profits are supposed to be the reward..

But, if recent history has taught us anything, it’s that self-regulation doesn’t work in finance, and that worries about reputation are a weak deterr….

If companies tell us more, insider trading will be worth less..

A long-term crisis, after a certain point, no longer seems like a crisis. It seems like the way things are..

In a world where companies increasingly know about their business in real time, it makes no sense that public reporting mostly follows the old quarte….

In terms of productivity - that is, how much a worker produces in an hour - there's little difference between the U.S., France, and Germany. But sinc….

Movies' mistrust of capitalism is almost as old as the medium itself..

From a social point of view, it's beneficial that homeownership encourages commitment to a given town or city. But, from an economic point of view, i….

The challenge for capitalism is that the things that breed trust also breed the environment for fraud..

In American politics, 'Europe' is usually a code word for 'big government.'.

If someone really wants my company's business, why shouldn't he be able to do everything he can - including paying me off - to get that business? Bec….

What the investment community does like is short-term measures designed to boost share prices..