In presenting a Nobel to Robert J. Shiller, the prize-giving committee did the right thing, recognizing a contribution that challenged a piece of received wisdom—the idea that financial markets are efficient, in the sense that they accurately reflect all available information, and, apart from some short-lived aberrations, generally get prices right. Today, after the inflation and bursting of two speculative bubbles in the course of a decade, it might seem pretty obvious that financial markets sometimes go haywire, and in a big way. But thirty-odd years ago, when Shiller began publishing papers that contradicted the efficient-markets hypothesis, such talk was regarded as heresy in parts of the American economics profession. Shiller stuck with it, extending his research from the stock market to the bond market and the real-estate market. (His most important articles were collected in his 1992 book, Market Volatility.)

According to a survey of 2,000 graduate and undergraduate business schools, the University of Michigan has the best graduate entrepreneurship program in the country, while Babson College tops the undergraduate list.

The University of Michigan Water Center has awarded eight research grants totaling nearly $2.9 million to support Great Lakes restoration and protection efforts. The projects include work to support efforts to restore native fish migrations across the Great Lakes basin, assess strategies to restore the health of the Green Bay ecosystem under a changing climate, and improve water quality in the western Lake Erie basin.

The University of Michigan recently released the most comprehensive research report on fracking to date, which looks into potential environmental and public health risks of extracting natural gas.

There are a lot of health benefits from eating fish. But some kinds of fish contain high levels of mercury. A form of mercury called methylmercury is toxic to people, and the main way that gets into our bodies is from eating fish. It can cause damage to the nervous system, the heart, kidneys, lungs, and immune system.

Laser-guided surgery could improve the odds of removing all of a brain tumor by clearly highlighting its edges, U.S. researchers say. Surgeons are cautious with brain tumors as removing the surrounding tissue could lead to disability. A technique, reported in Science Translational Medicine, used a laser to analyze the chemistry of the tissue and show the tumor in a different color. Brain tumor researchers said it could be an “exciting development.” Removing a brain tumor is a balancing act—take too little and the cancer could return, take too much and it seriously affects a patient’s quality of life. The key is knowing the boundary of the tumor. Surgeons take sections of the tumor and surrounding tissue and look under a microscope for the differences between the two to find the cancer’s edge. A team at the University of Michigan Medical School and Harvard University have come up with a new way of analyzing the tissue, called SRS microscopy, while it is still in the brain.

Orfin Ventures Founder Adam Finkel discusses why he thinks Detroit is ready for venture capital with Deirdre Bolton on Bloomberg Television’s “Money Moves.”

Childhood cancers are rated as the top public priority for children’s health research. According to the C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital National Poll on Children’s Health, childhood cancer was endorsed most frequently as “very important,” followed by diabetes, and then birth defects and other genetic problems.
According to the hospital, cancer is the leading cause of death by disease among children in the United States. One out of five children diagnosed with cancer does not survive.

“Remember ‘Lehman Weekend’: Don’t let up on reforms,” warns CNBC contributor Michael S. Barr, a law professor at the University of Michigan Law School and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and the Center for American Progress. He served as assistant secretary of the Treasury for financial institutions, 2009-10 and was a key architect of the Dodd-Frank reform act. Read what he has to say about our nation’s financial future.