This week in research #70

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

• Burton (with ungated earlier version here) finds that smoking bans in bars in the US result in a 1-drink-per-month (5 percent) increase in alcohol consumption and no economically meaningful effects on smoking
• Perron and Hu (open access) find that, in the NHL, each additional locally born player completing a full season is associated with an increase in home game attendance by approximately 12,000 spectators and $4.8 million in additional revenue
• Dalal and Raju develop a theoretical model of the illegal drugs market, and show that, under risk aversion, increasing punishment costs (i.e., severity) is more effective than increased enforcement (i.e., certainty) and demand reduction is more effective than interdiction
• Faerber-Ovaska et al. (open access) test the accuracy of ChatGPT’s answers to multiple-choice and short essay questions from a widely used economics textbook, and find that ChatGPT scored a high D in multiple-choice questions and a low A in essay questions (I feel like the world has already moved on from this though, as I noted in this post)
• Cheah and Qi develop a theoretical model of the effect of broadcast revenue on competitive balance in sports, and their simulations with the model show that broadcast revenue allows teams with smaller home fan bases to narrow their performance gap against stronger teams (it must depend on revenue sharing rules though, surely?)
• Reimão et al. find that expert judges favour the first dish tasted in a blind test in the Great British Bakeoff (and other English-speaking versions of the show)