110-joshua-gans.jpgLast year I had the pleasure of presenting a seminar at Yahoo Research. One of the things that interested me about that part of Yahoo was the fact that it had, in my field of economics, made some very significant hires from academia. In a time where some academically oriented labs had fallen aside, Yahoo had moved in the other direction. And this wasn’t some independent and loosely tied research organization. The economists I knew were heavily embedded and yet still publishing freely.