SAN ANTONIO — Steven Levitt, an academic economist with the University of Chicago and co-author of the bestselling books Freakonomics and Super Freakonomics believes credit unions would benefit if more of them looked at data, particularly information related to incentives, in unusual and novel ways.

The award-winning economist told credit union executives attending PSCU's 2011 Senior Leadership Workshop & Member Forum that economists really have little to offer in the way of understanding of macroeconomics but understand both the impact of incentives and the importance of data very well.

He used as an example a story of an IRS employee in the mid-1980s who noticed that there were occasionally tax returns where parents listed their children with names like "Fluffy." At the time, the agency did not require Social Security numbers for dependent children on tax returns, and the employee told the agency that it might find requiring such numbers a useful way of ending one method of tax cheating.