This week in research #142

Here's what caught my eye in research over the past week:

• Sacerdote, Staiger, and Tine (with ungated earlier version here) find that test score–optional policies harm the likelihood of admission for high-achieving applicants from disadvantaged backgrounds, meaning that the availability of test scores on an application can promote rather than hinder social mobility
• Armona et al. (with ungated earlier version here) develop and test a model of what is newsworthy to a media outlet
• Crossin et al. (open access if you set up a free account) find using data from a nationally representative sample that an estimated 71.1 percent of the New Zealand population think politicians should do more to keep people safe from alcohol harm, with majority support across the political spectrum
• Smit (open access) outlines the drawbacks to remote working that may have prevented greater internal migration from cities to the periphery in the Netherlands

Jeanna Smialek on why we should remember Maria Edgeworth

I have read several books now on the history of economic thought and, for the most part, women are conspicuously absent from those books. One obvious exception is Edith Kuiper's A Herstory of Economics (which I reviewed here), and there are a few bits in Steven Medema's The Economics Book (which I reviewed here). The latter brought both Harriet Martineau and Jane Marcet to my attention (and my two class AI tutors, Harriet in ECONS101, and Jane in ECONS102, are named after them).

A surprising omission from both books was brought to my attention by this New York Times article (ungated version here) by Jeanna Smialik: Maria Edgeworth. [*] According to Wikipedia, Maria Edgeworth was a novelist and an aunt of the much more famous 19th Century economist, Francis Ysidro Edgeworth. However, Smialek makes a strong case for the importance of Maria Edgeworth as one of the earliest voices in the developing field of economics, with her economics expressed within her fiction. However, Smialek also spends some efforts to explain why Edgeworth has been largely forgotten as an economist:

As the field professionalized, the second- and third-generation economists distanced themselves from the women and the fiction that had once helped to popularize and explain their ideas. Serious science, after all, could not possibly be for everyone. The economist Alfred Marshall referred to the women who tried to simplify economic doctrine as “parasites” in a footnote to his hugely influential textbook, “Principles of Economics,” first published in 1890 and popular throughout the 1900s...

Her literature was lost partly because of its clunkiness — its economics lessons made it harder to digest as lighter and more naturalistic stories became the style.

Her economics was lost for a different reason. Subsequent influential academics disparaged the ways that the early women of economics had presented the field. They bristled at being simplified, and they dismissed the idea that the women could have contributed something meaningful. 

Smialek also notes that Edgeworth provided editorial comments on Jane Marcet's Conversations on Political Economy, arguably the first economics textbook:

Edgeworth was as skilled an editor as she was a writer. She told Marcet that Adam Smith ought to be abridged, because he “needs it much,” whereas the utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham was “absolutely impossible” to put in fewer words, because what he needed was “to be diluted.”

“The more amusing anecdote & illustration you can mix with your solid information the better,” Edgeworth wrote to Marcet. “It should be your object rather to sow seeds than to exhibit full grown plants — Your work should excite curiosity to go further.”

Clearly, there is more for us to learn about the history of economic thought from Maria Edgeworth's life and her writing. And we are in luck! Smialek has a forthcoming book about Edgeworth due to be released next month, titled The Invisible Hand of Maria Edgeworth. I'm definitely looking forward to that one, and you can expect a review of it here in due course (although, with my backlog of reading, that might not be until sometime next year!).

*****

[*] Smialek notes that Maria Edgeworth was brought to her attention by Robert Heilbroner's The Worldly Philosophers (which I reviewed here). Heilbroner's reference to Edgeworth clearly didn't make as great an impression on me, as I don't remember it!

The impact of a subtle wording change on measurement of worries about climate change

Consider the following statement: "The effects of climate change are too far in the future to really worry me". Would you say that you: strongly agree with that statement; tend to agree; neither agree nor disagree; tend to disagree; or strongly disagree? Now consider this alternative wording of the same statement: "The effects of climate change are too far in the future to really worry about". Would your level of agreement be the same to this second statement as to the first?

There is good reason to believe that the wording of that question matters, as shown in this new article by Lieke Voorintholt (Trier University), Adriaan Soetevent, and Gerard van den Berg (both University of Groningen), published in the Journal of Economic Psychology (ungated earlier version here). They argue that the single-word difference, from "worry me" to "worry about" may shift respondents' focus from themselves individually towards broader society. Therefore, they hypothesise that more survey respondents would report being worried when asked if they worry about the effects, compared to whether the effects worry them individually. They also hypothesise that the treatment effect would be greater for older respondents, since the "about" version prompts thinking beyond the respondent's own life expectancy.

Voorintholt et al. use data from the Innovation Panel of Understanding Society, which its website describes as "a test-bed for innovative ways of collecting data and for developing new areas of research". The survey is run in Great Britain, and their analysis is based on a sample of 2791 survey respondents from Wave 16 of the survey, conducted in 2023. Half of the respondents were randomised to be asked the "me" version of the question, and the other half were asked the "about" question. Voorintholt et al. term the "me" version the control group, because that is the wording that is used in the main Understanding Society survey. So, the treatment is simply the replacement of "me" with "about" in the wording of the statement.

Their main results are summarised in Figure 1 from the article:

When asked the "about" version, more respondents say they strongly disagree with the statement, while fewer respondents say they tend to agree with the statement. These differences can be interpreted as greater worries about climate change expressed by the treatment group than the control group. This is also supported by their quantitative analysis, which shows the average response among treated respondents is 0.18 points higher (on a 1-5 scale from strongly agree to strongly disagree) than control respondents. Voorintholt et al. find some suggestive evidence in support of larger effects for older respondents. The coefficient on an interaction term between treatment and an age dummy variable for those aged 66 and over is positive and relatively large, but is statistically insignificant.

Overall though, this research is a good reminder that even a one-word change can materially affect how survey respondents answer a question, and therefore how we measure important variables. The effect of subtle changes should not be underestimated. If you want to measure the level of concern that people express about climate change, it really matters whether respondents are asked whether climate change “worries me” or whether it is something to “worry about”.

This week in research #141

This week I attended the 65th Congress of the European Regional Science Association in Sofia, Bulgaria. This is one of my favourite conferences each year, because of the quality and variety of papers that are presented. My own presentation was on the increasing trend towards natural population decrease (more deaths than births) across the territorial authorities and local boards in New Zealand, which will become an increasingly serious policy issue in the future. Here are some of the highlights I found from the conference:

• Ugo Fratesi (abstract 270, on page 2 of the abstract book) looked at regional resilience to positive shocks in China, flipping on its head the idea of resilience, which is usually only applied to negative shocks (and this generated a bit of discussion about whether resilience is the right word to use in that context)
• Elisabetta Ottoz (abstract 126, on page 8 of the abstract book) investigated businesses operating in the night-time economy in Italian cities, finding that those businesses were larger and more profitable than recreational businesses that operated during the daytime or evenings
• Peter Nijkamp gave a very detailed keynote that focused on wellbeing and introduced me to a variety of new terms drawn from disparate parts of the literature, including 'city love' (because love is more enduring than happiness), spatial comfort zones (where people are unwilling to move away, because they have everything they need within some close distance), prosilience (like resilience, but more about making the most out of a negative shock so that the area ends up better rather than simply returning to the previous state), and panarchy (adjustment behaviour is cyclical both temporally and spatially)
• In his discussion of Nijkamp's keynote, Kingsley Haynes laid down a challenge, noting that regional scientists had done a great job of analysing aggregate data, but not so much with individual-level data (which reminded me of at least two conversations I have had over the years about how difficult or impossible it is to apply spatial models to individual-level data)
• Zhiwu Wei (working paper here) looked at the relationship between local wealth inequality and protests in the Global South, finding that the positive inequality-protest relationship is very localised, and weakens substantially as you consider a broader definition of what is 'local'
• Alessandra Faggian (abstract 537, on page 93 of the abstract book) investigated the relationship between fertility and productivity in Italy, using historical wheat suitability as an instrument, and found that higher local productivity leads to significantly higher fertility rates (I'm not sure there is a policy prescription here, because raising productivity seems to be just as difficult as raising fertility!)
• Simone Piras (abstract 111, on page 130 of the abstract book) presented the results of a discrete choice experiment of Scottish residents’ willingness to move (or not) to places that differ in terms of various attributes, finding that residents would be more willing to move to places with good natural environment and digital connectivity and which are close to services and family, and that an intervention that provided information about Scotland's national policy on balancing the population had only small impacts

Aside from the conference, here's what caught my eye in research over the past week:

• Gans (open access) shows using a theoretical model that prompt injection to manipulate AI referees of journal article submissions can actually improve the peer review process under certain conditions (I'd want to see some empirical support for this before I believed it)
• Di Iasio and Wahba (open access) find that stronger anti-immigration attitudes significantly reduce migration inflows to EU destinations, with effects that are larger for intra-EU mobility than for migration from non-EU countries
• Wang and Liang find that city-level crime rates declined by a statistically significant 5.7 percent following Hukou reform in China, which freed up internal migration
• Ardito et al. (with ungated earlier version here) find that delayed retirement as a result of pension reform in Italy significantly increased sick leave due to occupational injuries, by 2.6 percent of the pre-reform mean