interesting biz-nass story....

THE showpiece of forensic economics is research done a few years ago that suggested that mutual fund traders were regularly backdating their trades. Wall Street attacked the findings at first. But they stood up to scrutiny, and Eliot Spitzer, New York's attorney general, used them to force reforms on the industry.

You can probably guess where this is going. Mr. Wolfers has collected the results of nearly every college basketball game over the last 16 years. In a surprisingly large number of them, it turns out that heavy favorites just miss covering the spread. He considered a number of other explanations, but he thinks there is only one that can explain the pattern. Point shaving appears to be occurring in about 5 percent of all games with large spreads.