This week in research #53

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

• Dentler and Rossi (open access) use data from Rochester, NY, and find that residents are willing to pay between 7% and 18% of house valuations to avoid crime
• Kühn and Wolbring (open access) use deepfaked job application videos and find that more attractive applicants score higher in competence ratings and are more likely to be invited for a job interview than less attractive candidates, but that only men consistently profit from their looks, while women benefit from a beauty premium in female-typed, but not in male-typed jobs
• Akyildirim et al. (including my colleagues Shaen Corbet and Greg Hou) find that a cyberattack leads stock returns to decrease by -0.24%, but the effect reverses in about two weeks
• Aridor et al. (with ungated earlier version here) summarise the literature on the economics of social media
• Courtemanche et al. find no evidence that e-cigarette licensure laws affect youth use of 'electronic nicotine delivery systems', using data from the US State Youth Risk Behavior Survey (useful evidence for the New Zealand context as well, I expect)
• Cannistrà et al. (open access) evaluate the impact of an online game-based financial education tool, and find that it increases financial literacy levels by 0.313 standard deviations, in a sample across four countries
• Karadas and Schlosky look at the stock trades of US Members of Congress from 2004 to 2022, and find that politicians trade more when Congress is in session and when geopolitical risk is high, as well as making more buy trades when economic policy uncertainty and equity market volatility are high
• Ash et al. (open access) find that an increase of 0.05 rating points in Fox News viewership, induced by exogenous changes in channel placement, has increased Republican vote shares by at least 0.5 percentage points in recent presidential, Senate, House, and gubernatorial elections

And the latest paper from my own research (or, more accurately, this is the first paper from the thesis research of my PhD student Jayani Wijesinghe, on which I am a co-author along with Susan Olivia and Les Oxley):

• Our new working paper investigates the trends and factors associated with state-level life expectancy and lifespan inequality (inequality in the length of life) in the US over the period from 1968 to 2020, finding a strong and statistically significant negative correlation between life expectancy and lifespan inequality, and that greater lifespan inequality is associated with state-level education, demographics, various health variables, and income inequality

Also new from the Waikato working papers series:

• Gibson, Kim and Li examine relationships between nighttime lights (luminosity) and local economic growth for counties in China and the US and districts in Indonesia, and find that GDP-luminosity elasticities vary especially by spatial scale and metro status, and also by period and remote sensing source, meaning that claimed growth effects in previous studies based on nighttime lights may be quite inaccurate