This week in research #13

Here's what caught my eye in research over the past (clearly, very active) week:

• Exley and Nielsen (with ungated earlier version here) use experimental data to show that the gender gap in confidence (with women being less confident than men) causes evaluators to form overly pessimistic beliefs about women (happy International Women's Day, I guess?)
• Chapple (open access) finds that previous estimates of a pre-European-contact Māori population of 100,000 may be underestimated by more than half
• Bertola (open access) shows theoretically that opportunities to re-take an exam generally increase the probability of eventually passing a given threshold at given competence, but decrease preparation for exams (no surprises there)
• Parshakov et al. (open access) find a statistically significant beauty premium among Major League Soccer players, with players with greater facial symmetry being paid a higher salary
• On a somewhat similar note, Pieper and Schulze look at the social media popularity of all female soccer players who took part in the European Championship 2022, and find that while beauty has no statistically significant direct effect on players’ market values, it indirectly affects their values through the effect on social media popularity
• Basiglio, Foresta, and Turati (with ungated earlier version here) find a positive association between  impatience and crime, using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 in the US
• Elass (open access) uses data from the UK, France and Finland, and a novel microsimulation method, and finds that disparities in the gender wage gap between these countries are driven by occupational segregation (clustering of men and women in different occupations) and public spending on families
• Abrahams finds that on average, firms didn't cut wages when the minimum wage in St. Louis fell in nominal terms in 2017 (interesting because we rarely see the effects of decreases in the minimum wage)
• Reis, Godinho de Matos, and Ferreira (open access) find that batch DNS filtering of copyright-infringing websites leads to a significant reduction in Internet traffic, which they argue represents a significant decrease in internet piracy
• Cotofan, Dur, and Meier (with ungated earlier version here) look at US General Social Survey data, and find that experiencing bad macroeconomic circumstances between the ages of 18 and 25 strengthens anti-immigration attitudes for life
• Collins and Lundstedt (with ungated earlier version here) use Swedish data to show that more granular grading scales discourage students, with students less likely to graduate from high school, from academic high school tracks, and from STEM and art high school tracks, and less likely to enrol in STEM courses at university
• Goulão et al. (open access) find using a field experiment that job applications with a photo manipulated to make a person seem overweight results in fewer callbacks for men (compared with a photo showing normal weight), and that this effect is especially pronounced in female dominated occupations, but the results are opposite for women