I’m at the Southern Economic Association meeting this weekend. We’ll be sharing food, fun, laughs, and our research. I’m looking for things to trim off my “Projects” list, so I’m going to start blogging ideas for papers I’ll never take the time to write in the hope that somewhere there’s an enterprising grad student looking for a paper. So here’s an idea: labor market regulation, labor unions, and the explosion in reality television. My hypothesis is that the recent rise in reality TV is partially due to the fact that reality shows don’t have to deal with unionized writers. I would be interested in seeing whether there’s a strong relationship between unionization and the rise in reality TV. This was all well underway by the time of the Writers’ Strike, but I wouldn’t be surprised if we started to see a lot more reality TV after the strike.