This week in research #14

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

• Badunenko and Popova (open access) find that in Germany from 1985 to 2015, while income inequality has increased significantly, migration did not contribute to that increase
• Adabor (open access) finds that the COVID-19 support payment in Australia is positively associated with gambling, with larger effects on male gamblers and online gamblers (I guess gambling is a normal good?)
• Hadavand, Hamermesh, and Wilson show that economics publishing proceeds much more slowly than in the natural sciences, and more slowly than in the other social sciences and finance, and that much of the lag is the result of authors taking a long time to complete revisions (time for economists to stop complaining, and start revising-and-resubmitting their papers!)
• Eugster and Uhl (open access) show that sentiment data, based on 730.000 news articles between Q1 2003 and Q4 2021, is able to forecast inflation more accurately than a naive random walk
• Tomlin (open access) finds in a field experiment that tenant applicants that reveal their pronouns are less likely to receive a response from a landlord, regardless of whether the pronouns signalled that the applicant was cisgender or transgender
• Brander et al. (open access) estimate from a survey that households would be willing to pay US$79 per year to conserve marine turtles, implying that taking policy action to conserve, manage and protect marine turtles would generate US$55 billion in value

Finally, I am giving a Professorial Lecture at the University of Waikato on Tuesday 26 March. This public lecture is titled Beyond the Buzz: The Sobering Economics of Alcohol, and it builds on my last 15-plus years of research on the social impacts of alcohol. All new professors must give one of these lectures, and I've been dodging it for over a year! The event is free (and they'll even feed you beforehand), but to go you need to register here. I'm not just adding a sales pitch when I say that tickets have been selling fast, so if you want to come along you need to get your ticket sooner rather than later.