This week in research #81

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

• Farnell et al. (open access) use data from Major League Baseball pitchers to study task switching, finding that task switching between pitching and batting, can improve subsequent pitching performance, shown by fastball velocity increasing by up to 0.225mph on average after reaching base
• Reddy critiques the work of 2024 Nobel Prize winners Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson, arguing that their property-rights-based approach is excessively narrow, and that other factors, including the privileged relationship between settlers and their countries of origin, can both explain the divergence between settler colonies and other countries