This week in research #79

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

• Berg et al. (with ungated earlier version here) find that Buy-Now-Pay-Later increases sales by 20%, driven by customers with low-creditworthiness and products where market power is larger
• Vatsa and Pino find a positive association between petrol and food price inflation and inflation perceptions in New Zealand
• Peukert and Windisch (open access) provide a synthesis of the literature on the law and economics of copyright in the digital age, paying special attention to online copyright enforcement, changes in the supply of works due to digital technology, and the importance of creative re-use and new licensing and business models
• Gechert et al. (open access) systematically review a wide range of influential meta-analyses in economics and compare them to 'conventional wisdom', finding that the effect sizes decrease by 45 to 60 percent on average in the meta-analyses, compared with the 'conventional wisdom'
• Geddes and Holz (with ungated earlier version here) find that, under rent control, vacancy decontrol provisions that allow rent re-sets between tenants increase the number of evictions and wrongful eviction claims, using data from San Francisco
• Also on rent control, Stacy et al. (open access) find that more restrictive rent control reforms are associated with a 10% reduction in the total number of rental units in a city, and that while reforms lead to an increase in the availability of units affordable to extremely low-income households by about 52%, this is offset by a decline in units affordable to higher-income households of about 46%
• Cattaneo, Gschwendt, and Wolter (open access) find, using a discrete choice experiment, that Swiss workers are willing to accept a salary reduction of almost 20% of the Swiss median annual gross wage to reduce their automation risk by 10 percentage points or, conversely, demand a 20% risk premium to accept an equivalent increase in automation risk
• Selva, Deng, and Zhang (with ungated earlier version here) track all facemasks sold on Amazon from September 2019 to September 2020, and find that the average user rating of a facemask dropped significantly following the first consumer review or question and answer stating it was made in China, but not for other countries
• Datta and Tzur-Ilan (with ungated earlier version here) document a slight increase in women’s representation in the Federal Reserve system over the past 20 years, although noting that there is still a persistent gender gap in research output
• Teutloff et al. (open access) look at data on freelance jobs and find that labour demand increased after the launch of ChatGPT, but only in skill clusters that were complementary to or unaffected by the AI tool, while demand for substitutable skills, such as writing and translation, decreased by 20-50% relative to the counterfactual trend, with the sharpest decline for short-term (1-3 week) jobs
• Adamson (open access) finds that the spatial covariance of natural vegetation endowments amongst potential trading partners is important for explaining the development of silver coin money, battles, and city-state formation in ancient Greek city-states
• Migliore, Rossi-Lamastra, and Tagliaro (open access) find that the decision to prioritise work on-site at university over working from home positively influences scientific productivity, using data from Italian academics
• Goehring looks at historical data on sex work in Britain, and finds that the 1861 'cotton shock' recession led to 12 more establishments per 100,000 people in exposed counties, an increase of approximately 20%