This week in research #50

As I mentioned, last week I was at the North American Regional Science Congress in New Orleans. This isn't a science conference per se. Regional science is essentially a mix of economics, geography, sociology, and political science (and a bunch of other fields mixed in as well). As is often the case, there were more sessions that I wanted to attend than I could possibly attend, but here are some of the highlights I found from the conference:

• My long-time friend and collaborator Matt Roskruge presented on the challenges of developing quantitative measures of Māori social capital (my takeaway was that it may be best to throw away the Western conceptions of social capital, and start over with a Te Ao Māori (Māori worldview) perspective, but apparently that has been done several times already)
• Steven Deller presented on elder care and female labour force participation, showing that female labour force participation is lower in counties that have less access to elder care
• Rosella Nicolini presented data that showed immigrants in rural areas are associated with increased GDP growth in Spain, while immigrants in urban areas are associated with decreased GDP growth
• Rafael González-Val presented analysis of the impacts of the Spanish Civil War, showing a large (12 percent) reduction in industrial employment in provinces aligned with the Republicans, compared to those aligned with the rebels (although it must be noted that all of Spain's main industrial centres were aligned with the Republicans, so it may be no surprise that they declined relative to other regions)
• Aurelie Lalanne presented some amazingly detailed data on urban growth in France, drawn from historical censuses that have been harmonised, and covering the period from 1800-2015

Aside from the conference, here's what caught my eye in research over the past week:

• Davis, Ghent, and Gregory (with ungated earlier version here) use a simulation model (calibrated to real-world data) to show that the pandemic induced a large change to the relative productivity of working from home that substantially increased home prices and will permanently affect incomes, income inequality, and city structure
• Galasso and Profeta find that reducing or eliminating time pressure decreases the math gender gap by up to 40 percent, and that time pressure contributes to the gap through increased anxiety rather than through students modifying their test-taking strategies
• Mizzi (open access) looks at how economics teachers develop and utilise pedagogical content knowledge (the intersection of pedagogical knowledge and content knowledge) to assist their students’ engagement with disciplinary knowledge in economics (I feel like we should know more about this topic)
• Liu et al. find that large increases in minimum wages have significant adverse effects on workplace safety, increasing work accidents by 4.6 percent, based on US state-level data
• Matthes and Piazolo (open access) analyse data from over 40 seasons of professional road cycling races, and find that having a teammate in a group behind positively impacts win probability
• Fernando and George find that home-team cricket umpires are less biased when working with a neutral colleague (one who is neither a national of the home nor the foreign team)
• Chilton et al. find that there are large potential gains in better identifying exceptional students in law schools, if changes were made to certain personnel, course, and grading policies to improve the signalling quality of grades (and yet to me, it seems like most universities are on a policy trajectory to reduce the quality of grades as a signal)