This week in research #71

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

• Bertola and Lo Prete (open access) find large propensities to guess in Italian data from a survey on financial literacy and resilience, and show that truly financially literate respondents are more likely than those who guessed and randomly picked the correct answers in the financial literacy test to make ends meet at the end of the month and to cope with unexpected expenses
• Feyzollahi and Rafizadeh investigate the likely use of large language models in the writing of papers published in 25 top economics journals, and find a 4.76 percentage point increase in LLM-associated terms during 2023–2024, and that the effect more than doubles from 2.85 percentage points in 2023 to 6.67 percentage points in 2024, suggesting rapid integration of language models in economics research (are you also wondering if their paper was partly written by an LLM?)
• Hatton (open access) presents new data on the voyage times and travel costs for emigrants from the UK traveling to the US and to Australia from 1850 to 1913, showing that the voyage time from Liverpool to New York fell from 38 days to just 8 days (or 79 per cent), and the voyage time to Sydney fell from 105 days to 46 days (or 56 per cent)
• Brakman, Kohl, and van Marrewijk (open access) use a gravity model to link long-run changes of the demographic dividend to geographical changes in world trade for the 21st century, and show that, compared to the current situation, North America and Europe will no longer be the centre of global trade in 2100 due to their aging populations, while South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa will experience a substantial increase in their share of world trade, and China will experience a substantial decrease
• De Haro investigates whether declining drug revenues in Mexico incentivised cartels to target the avocado sector, and finds that the decline in the demand for heroin increased homicide rates, including those of agricultural workers, as well as truckload thefts in avocado-growing municipalities
• Chenarides et al. find that dollar store presence in a county corresponds with higher employment levels within the general merchandise retail sector, and decreases in average weekly earnings (although these reverse in urban areas over time)