This week in research #5

It's been a busy week. Here's what caught my eye in research:

• Anderson builds up a non-parametric gravity model (quite technical, but likely of interest to trade and migration researchers)
• Samahita and Devereaux look at gender inequality in conference acceptance using data from the Irish Economic Association annual conference from 2016 to 2022, and find no gender gap in acceptances; however, male reviewers give female authors lower review scores (open access)
• Ramalingam and Stoddard experimentally test whether experiencing inequality increases cooperation (in terms of contributions to public goods), and find that it doesn't (ungated earlier version here)
• Mills discusses the economics of time travel (open access)
• Ezcurra shows that exposure to ultraviolet radiation is a predictor of national-level state capacity (open access) - related to this post, where I was sceptical of some similar earlier research

The Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization released a special issue on the economics of beauty, which included the following:

• Gründler, Potrafke, and Wochner find that attractive MPs are more likely to be absent from the German parliament and less active in labour-intensive background work than others (ungated earlier version here)
• Adamopoulou and Kaya use Add Health data on US high school students to show that, somewhat surprisingly, for boys both physical and personality attractiveness positively affect performance and peer characteristics also matter (more attractive peers lowers performance), but for girls only personality attractiveness matters (open access)
• Babin, Chauhan, and Kistler show that professional e-sports competitors rated as more attractive are more likely to receive a contract in the following year, but there is no lifetime earnings premium
• Baert, Herregods, and Sterkens use an experiment to show that job candidates with body art are perceived as less pleasant to work with, less honest, less emotionally stable, less agreeable, less conscientious and less manageable (open access) - this would have been more convincing as a field experiment (see here or here, for example)