This week in research #65

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

• Yildirim and Bilman look at how removing the away goals rule and the introduction of video assistant referees affected soccer (ok, football) game dynamics in the UEFA Champions League, finding that removing the away goals rule increased defensive play, and the introduction of VAR led to less referee bias against away teams
• Nguyen, Ost, and Qureshi (with ungated earlier version here) find that recent generations of elementary school teachers are significantly more effective at raising math test scores for students than those from earlier generations, and that the effects are significantly larger for African American students
• Sievertsen and Smith (open access) find that the opinions of individual expert economists affect the opinions expressed by the public, the opinions expressed by visibly senior female economists are more persuasive than the same opinions expressed by male economists, and that removing credentials (university and professor title) eliminates the gender difference in persuasiveness, suggesting that credentials act as a differential information signal about the credibility of female experts
• Ersoy and Speer (with ungated earlier version here) find that university student choices of major depend on non-job-related factors, such as a major’s course difficulty and gender composition, and while female students tend to avoid majors that are more difficult than they originally believed, male students are averse to majors with more female faculty but prefer those with more female students
• Qi, Wang, and Wang find that there is an inverted U-shaped relationship between income inequality and economic growth in the long run (so economic growth is lowest when inequality is low, and when inequality is high)
• Gans (with ungated earlier version here) shows that time travel does not undermine but rather reinforces the no-arbitrage conditions at the heart of the Efficient Markets Hypothesis
• Jansson and Tyrefors (open access) investigate at university-wide anonymous grading reform at Stockholm University benefited female students more than male students
• Abreha, Johnson, and Robertson (with ungated earlier version here) find that President Bukele’s 2022 crime crackdown in El Salvador reduced outward migration from El Salvador to the US by 45%-67%