This week in research #27

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

• Whitelaw and Branson (open access) estimate the effects of pandemic-related closures on the academic performance trajectories of undergraduate students at a university in South Africa, and find performance gains in 2020, that were reversed in 2021, and that the achievement gap between students from differing socio-economic backgrounds increased
• Similarly, Su et al. (open access) look at the impact of zero-COVID policies on the academic performance of primary and secondary students in China, and find that the stringency of the zero-COVID policy is associated with significantly better mathematics performance for boys, while having no effects on girls
• Schläpfer finds that football (soccer) players from a cultural background that places a higher value on revenge are more likely to retaliate for a foul during a game but are not more likely to commit fouls overall, using data from nine football leagues over the period from 2016 to 2019
• Jeong and Lee (open access) introduce a spatial autoregressive hurdle model for nonnegative origin-destination flows (pretty technical, but interesting to those of us who may want to create econometric models or migration or trade flows that take into account spatial spillovers
• Niki (open access) uses TIMSS data from Japan to show that a reduction in instruction time due to the revision of curriculum guidelines in Japan reduced student test scores and motivation (no surprises there?)
• Anand and Kahn (with ungated earlier version here) find that teenage girls who observe a friend or older sibling’s teen pregnancy are less likely to have unprotected sex and have fewer sexual partners in the year following the end of the teen pregnancy
• Celhay, Depetris-Chauvin, and Riquelme (with ungated earlier version here) find that the 2011 nationwide student strike in Chile led to an average increase of 2.7% in teenage pregnancies (I guess students found something to do in their spare time during the strike?)