This week in research #24

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

• Christensen, Dinesen, and Sønderskov (open access) find using a panel survey linked to Danish registry data that increased exposure to poor individuals is associated with lower support for redistribution among wealthy individuals (which contradicts the current consensus on this topic)
• Sabia et al. find using US state-level data that recreational marijuana laws increase the use of marijuana by adults and reduce marijuana-related arrests, but there is little evidence that the laws increase the use of harder drugs, admissions to substance use treatment facilities, or property and violent crime (which contrasts with some earlier research)
• Spencer (with ungated earlier version here) finds that the AIDS epidemic in the US increased the birth rate by 0.55 percent and the abortion rate by 1.77 percent, as women opted for more monogamous partnerships and/or switched from prescription contraceptive methods to condoms

The American Economic Review published its annual papers and proceedings issue this week, which included the following papers (and yes, gender seems to have been a big theme at the AEA Conference this year):

• Iyigun, Mueller, and Qian (with ungated earlier version here) find that consecutive and prolonged drops in temperature are positively associated with conflict between 1400 and 1900 CE
• Francis, de Oliveira, and Dimmitt find that even after controlling for how prepared a candidate seems, White males are more likely to be recommended for Advanced Placement (AP) Calculus, and that name-blind review has no effect
• Antman et al. look at economics dissertations over the period from 1991 to 2021, and find a remarkable rise in gender-related research in economics over time, and that women economists are significantly more likely to pursue gender-related dissertation topics
• Gualavisi, Kleemans, and Thornton (with ungated earlier version here) document a number of gender differences in the impacts of academic migration, including that women are significantly less likely to move for promotion than men, women are also more likely to move to lower-ranked institutions, and that men who work in departments receiving a new faculty member see their publication output increase more than twice than that of women at those departments
• Bansak et al. (with ungated earlier version here) look at the AER Papers and Proceedings from 1998 to 2017, and find that Papers and Proceedings evolved to become more inclusive, and that did not come at a cost in terms of quality
• Koffi, Pongou, and Wantchekon look at more than 200 economics journals over the period from 1990 to 2019 and find disproportionate racial disparities in authorship distribution
• Nguyen, Ost, and Qureshi find that Millennial teachers are more effective at reducing absences compared to Baby Boomer teachers in K-12 schools in North Carolina, and that this gap is larger for Black students
• Also for North Carolina, Zhu (with ungated version here) finds that teachers are significantly more negative in their assessments of English Learner students compared to non-English-Learner peers in the same classes with the same  standardised test score
• Agarwal et al. (with ungated version here) show that self-supervised algorithms have surpassed human radiologists in the long tail of diseases (those that are particularly uncommon) in terms of predictive ability