This week in research #37

From poolside in Tahiti, here's what caught my eye in research over the past week:

• Kanbur, Ortiz-Juarez, and Sumner (open access) examine the trajectory of global income inequality since 1981, and try to identify a future turning point, when the growth of China will reverse decades of decline  in global inequality (a revised version of the working paper by the same co-authors that I discussed here)

New from the Waikato working papers series:

• Zhang and Gibson study the effects of connecting county-level units to the high-speed rail network in China, and find that growth in local economic activity (proxied by nighttime lights) is lower following connection to the network
• Suzuki et al. quantify peer effects and water pollution spillovers between shrimp farmers in Southern Vietnam, and find that neighbours' farming practices positively affect a farmer's practices and a disease outbreak in neighbours' ponds affects disease outbreak in a farmer's pond, even after controlling for contextual peer effects and correlated effects
• Li et al. identify the city-level and province-level economic characteristics and social and natural amenities that drive net internal migration between cities and prefectures in China using data from the 2000, 2010, and 2020 censuses
• Xu et al. use face reading software to evaluate how people's emotions affect their stated preferences and willingness to pay for changes in environmental quality, finding that induced emotional state has no significant effect on stated preference estimates or on willingness to pay for an environmental quality change