Academic

In writing my latest article, "The Windfall Myth," I coded the use of the word "windfall" in various contexts:  media, court cases, and congressional testimony.  This post will report the findings of my media research.  I used electronic databases that contained articles from the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal to read articles in which the word "windfall" was used between January 1, 2007 and July 1, 2007.  I then coded these uses to attempt to categorize the types of economic gains that were labeled as windfalls in these articles.  In alphabetical order, the following groups emerged:  Attorney Fees, Breach of Contract, Business Profits, Campaign Finance, Charitable Gifts, Criminal Evidence, Gambling, Government Budgets (Government Receipts and Government Payment), Illegal Kickbacks, Inheritances, Intellectual Property, Litigation, Oil & Gas (Foreign Oil & Gas and Domestic Oil & Gas), Real Property, Salaries and Bonuses, Securities (Investments and Entrepreneurship), Other (nonmonetary), and Unspecified.  Which were the big targets of windfall rhetoric?

(findings below the fold)

The paper splits out the NYT and the WSJ dataset, but for the sake of the blogging short form, I'll just include the combined dataset here.  The NYT had 117 instances in 110 documents (excluding proper names).  Eerily similar, The WSJ had 116 instances in 101 documents.  The combined dataset then had 233 instances.  Of those, 155 (2/3 or just over 66%) were what I term "marketplace gains":  Oil & Gas, Securities, Business Profits, Salary/Bonuses, Real Property, and Intellectual Property.  For purposes of the paper, I call these alleged Excess Earned Windfalls.  I was surprised that lawful, earned profits were being characterized as windfalls.  Historically, windfalls were profits brought to you by the vagaries of the winds, and in law, windfalls are measures of damages we try to avoid awarding because they will grant double recoveries or compensated nonexistent losses.  Here, these profits are earned, and even negotiated.  They generally do not even fall into the category of contract payments we frown upon because of mistake or an exogenous shock that renders the contract void.