This week in research #52

I started this week at the Australia New Zealand Regional Science International (ANZRSAI) Conference in Canberra. Unfortunately, I left my notebook in one of the conference rooms at the end of the second day, so most of my notes were lost. However, from memory (and the camera roll on my phone) here are some of the highlights I found from the conference:

• Andrew Leigh (economist and Australian MP) gave a great keynote on inequality in Australia based on his revised book Battlers and Billionaires, although the most interesting bit was a graph on mentions of 'inequality' in Australian parliamentary debates, which is fairly low until a massive spike from 2011 onwards (I guess politicians didn't really care about inequality before then?)
• Putu Widyastaman presented on the relationship between gentrification and prostitution in Jakarta, showing that gentrification reduces prostitution in an urban village (roughly equivalent to a neighbourhood), but increases prostitution in surrounding urban villages
• John Madden presented on the economic impact of Victoria University's west Melbourne campus (although the counterfactual of 'what would have happened if Victoria University didn't have a campus in west Melbourne' is always going to be a challenge)
• Robert Tanton presented on a geocoded synthetic Census that is being developed for Australia, allowing researchers to conduct research on Census data without access to the underlying Census data (which is not a problem in New Zealand, where access to the Census data is available through the secure Integrated Data Infrastructure)

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

• Duan, Yuan, and Snyder find that a one standard deviation increase in the local sex ratio raises rural unmarried males’ likelihood of temporary migration in China by 3.6 percentage points
• Vatsa and Pino (open access) find that petrol price shocks had a slightly delayed but persistent effect on one-year inflation expectations in New Zealand, whereas five-year inflation expectations were largely insensitive to these shocks
• Meng et al. (with ungated earlier version here) find that a one-standard-deviation increase in wind turbines reduces bird abundance by 9.75% and leads to a 12.2% reduction in bird species richness at the county level in China
• Arora and Roy (with ungated earlier version here) do not find any significant differences in student evaluations of teaching received by female and male professors, using an experimental approach in India
• Abel et al. find that, in an experiment, investors are more likely to continue to follow financial advice from male professionals following advice that proves incorrect, but 47 percent less likely to follow financial advice from female professionals in the same circumstances
• Cordes, Dertwinkel-Kalt, and Werner (open access) investigate the economics of 'loot boxes' in online and mobile games using an experimental study design, and find that common design features of loot boxes (such as opaque odds and positively selected feedback) double the average willingness-to-pay for lotteries
• Klöcker and Daumann (open access) develop a theoretical model to explain success and dominance in international sports
• De Acutis, Weber, and Wurm (open access) conduct a meta-analysis of 51 studies on the effect of gender quotas on company boards, and find that (among other results) stock market returns are negatively affected by quota policies (I feel like there is more to this than meets the eye on a quick skim-read though)
• König et al. (open access) find that there is a statistically significant, but very small, positive association between short-term ambient temperature changes and individuals’ general willingness to take risks, using a large survey in Augsburg, Germany
• Lin, Churchill, and Ackermann (open access) find using 14 waves of HILDA data in Australia that a 1 percent increase in the proportion of a postcode that has access to the national broadband network (NBN) is associated with a 1.573 increase in Body Mass Index and a 6.6 percentage point increase in the probability of being obese
• Oprea challenges the existence of loss aversion by showing using experimental data that it may simply arise because of complexity of experimental tasks that are used to demonstrate loss aversion (which may also explain these results, I guess?)