This week in research #35

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

• Bertoni, Rettore, and Rocco (open access) find that at least one third of the within-course variation in student evaluations of teaching is driven by student-specific differences in subjective style of responding to evaluation questions
• Pertold-Gebicka (open access) finds that, for students at a Czech university, high-ability students were often discouraged from studying during the COVID-19 pandemic, while a lenient grading policy allowed low-ability students to pass the compulsory exams and continue studying
• Bingley and Lyk-Jensen find that conscription improves the deployed intelligence pool compared to a volunteer force in the Danish military
• Taylor and Weder (open access) explore the economics of extinction (of species)
• Siflinger et al. (open access) find that mental health decreased sharply with the onset of the first COVID-19 lockdown in the Netherlands, but that it recovered quickly, and that worsening mental health was associated with labour market uncertainty, perceived infection risk, loneliness, and having children younger than 12 years old
• Sperber et al. find that Marshmallow Test performance at age 54 months does not reliably predict adult outcomes at age 26 years (not dissimilar from these results)

The latest issue of the Journal of Economic Perspectives had three papers from a symposium on 'expanding the appeal of economics', which are interesting:

• Avilova and Goldin (open access) show that the AEA's Undergraduate Women in Economics  interventions were effective in increasing the fraction of female undergraduates who majored in economics relative to men in liberal arts colleges (an important update on the earlier paper I discussed here)
• Barrera et al. (open access) discuss what economics can learn from STEM in terms of student identity, particularly that whether a student develops a sense that they are a “science and technology person” depends on a student’s interest in the field of study, their sense of their own competence or performance in the field, and their experience of recognition for performing well in the discipline
• Cook and Moser (open access) describe what has been learned from executing the AEA Summer Program at Michigan State University from 2016 to 2020