There's no such thing as a "hot hand" or a "clutch player." And home field advantage exists only in the mind of referees.

These are a few of the insights gleaned from Scorecasting: The Hidden Influences Behind How Sports Are Played and Games Are Won. A collaboration between L. John Wertheim, a veteran Sports Illustrated correspondent and author of several books, and Tobias Moskowitz, a professor of economics at the University of Chicago, Scorecasting is what would happen if Moneyball met Freakonomics and spawned a child. The authors of the book, now out in paperback, apply data and insights into behavior to a range of sports-related issues.

One of their most powerful insights is the observation and description of "omission bias" — the notion that people avoid taking action that could be controversial rather than go out on a limb. Omission bias can be seen in officiating in virtually every sport, as umpires and referees generally avoid injecting themselves into the proceedings,

By Daniel Gross

We've been following the slow motion winding down of the crisis-era rescue programs, chief among the TARP. In the past week, a series of transactions and stock repurchases have returned about $5.62 billion to federal coffers. The most recent report can be seen here.

These are the recent transactions:

On March 9, Mainline Bancorp, of Ebensburg, Pennsylvania, bought back $4.5 million in preferred shares and bought back preferred stock it had given Treasury in lieu of warrants for $225,000. The transaction came about as a result of S&T Bancorp's acquisition of Mainline,

On March 8, Treasury received $5.576 billion from selling shares of AIG. As announced, Treasury sold about $3 billion in shares it owns in the insurance company to public investors, and another $3 billion back to the company. The total it received is net of commissions and fees. Treasury still owns about 70 percent of the company's common stock.

On March 7, Heritage Commerce Corp., based in San Jose,

By Daniel Gross

One of the big themes of the economy over the last year and a half has been a decline in both the rate and volume of financial failure. Mortgage and credit card delinquencies and corporate and personal bankruptcies have all been trending down. So, too, have bank failures. In fact, our once-weekly Failure Friday feature, which charts the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation's Friday-evening takeovers of failed banks, may have to be downgraded to Failure Every-Other-Friday. (Here's the complete failed bank list.)

In the past two weeks, two banks have failed.

On March 2, Global Commerce Bank, a three-branch bank based in Doraville, Georgia, with $144 million in assets, failed and was taken over by Metro City Bank.

On March 9, New City Bank, a Chicago-based institutions with $71.2 million in assets, was shuttered by the Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation. The bank was so far gone that no acquirer could be found for its assets, so the FDIC will

Mitt Romney is turning 65 today. That means he's now eligible for Medicare, the government-run insurance program that covers about 47 million older Americans. But he's not planning to enroll.

Medicare has emerged as a contentious campaign issue. Romney has embraced the proposal of Rep. Paul Ryan, which aims to keep Medicare intact for people currently in the program and for those who are approaching eligibility age, while transforming it for everybody else into a system of subsidies for people to purchase private insurance. In time, that proposal would essentially end Medicare as it currently exists and vastly increase out-of-pocket costs for participants. At the same time, Romney has criticized President Obama for cutting spending on Medicare in his budget.

Romney is doing his part to keep Medicare solvent — he's not signing up for it. The campaign has told my colleague Holly Bailey that the 65-year-old candidate plans to remain on his private insurance and will not enroll in

Every day, Michelle Leder and the crew at Footnoted.com comb through Securities and Exchange Commission filings in search of nuggets on executive pay, C-suite perks, and general corporate shenanigans. Every month she joins us to discuss the highlights and lowlights. February's crop includes a snake-bitten financial executive, an expose-worthy consulting deal at The New York Times Co., a rare bolt of candor and humility from Netflix, and fireman who are upset at Ralph Lauren.

His Name is Mudd. Literally. Daniel Mudd, son of the former NBC anchor Roger Mudd, enjoyed a soaring career in the finance field until a few years ago. He was the CEO of mortgage giant Fannie Mae until it went into federal conservatorship in the fall of 2008. Even though the company would require a massive bailout, Mudd walked away with a separation payment worth more than $9 million. Mudd quickly landed on his feet, as CEO of Fortress investment Group, the publicly held hedge fund/private-equity complex.

When something happens once, it's a phenomenon. When something happens twice, it's a coincidence. When something happens three times, it's a trend. That's an old journalistic rule of thumb. And by that rule, February's employment report confirmed that we have a trend of decent employment growth.

The headline number showed that the economy created a net 227,000 jobs in February. When the economy began to create jobs in significant numbers, analysts frequently pointed out that a job creation rate of 150,000 per month was barely enough to keep up with population growth, and wasn't enough to make a dent in unemployment. Now we're finally getting that growth. February marked the third straight month in which payroll jobs rose by more than 200,000. Gains could be seen in a range of industries: professional and business services, manufacturing, and health care. The construction and retail trade sectors shed positions.

The job market is starting to look better now, and it's also starting to

Is this the month the government sector stops being a drag on employment? As we've noted, for much of the last two years, the private sector has consistently added jobs, while state, city, and federal government entities have cut them.

With tax revenues falling off a cliff in 2009, austerity became the prevailing trend. With states and cities unable to run deficits, they compensated for lower revenues by reducing spending and cutting employment. Many states and cities are still facing economic crises. But on the whole, after nearly three years of expansion, revenues from sales and income taxes are generally rising across the board. The Rockefeller Institute in January reported that in the third quarter of 2011, overall state tax collections for the seventh straight quarter. Federal revenue collections are also up so far this fiscal year.

And that means there's less pressure to cut employment. Check out the numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. (Go here and click on "government"

The notion that success is a simple matter of following routine and sticking to good habits isn't exactly new. But in his just-released book, The Power of Habit: why We Do What We Do in Life and Business, Charles Duhigg explains why. An investigative reporter at the New York Times who also has an MBA, Duhigg taps into insights from biology, sports, consumer products marketing and manufacturing.

How do people kick smoking? How did Procter & Gamble turn Febreze into an also-ran into a big seller? How did Tony Dungy turn his National Football League defenses into champions? How did Paul O'Neill (the executive, not the baseball player) succeed at Alcoa? It all comes down to understanding the power of habits, Duhigg argues. "In the last ten years, our understanding of how habits work has been totally transformed, and companies take advantage of that," he said.

People, like animals studied by scientists in laboratories, tend to see a feedback loop in their behavior. They are cued or