This week in research #83

For the last two days, I've been at the New Zealand Population Conference in Wellington. There was some really interesting research presented, but the biggest talking point (unsurprisingly) was the recently announced changes to the Census. Here are some of the highlights I found from the conference:

• Irina Grossman presented a fast-paced keynote on small-area population projections, noting that machine learning methods do not systematically outperform simpler methods (and also noting that while many end-users say that they want measures of the uncertainty associated with projections to be reported, very few of them actually use those measures!)
• Rosemary Goodyear and Miranda Devlin presented new data on severe housing deprivation and homelessness in New Zealand which, among other things, showed that homelessness has been increasing in every Census since 2001, and that severe housing deprivation is highest among Pacific Peoples (but being 'without shelter' is highest among Māori)
• Jacques Poot reviewed various methods of modelling internal migration, using data from Australia, and similar to Grossman he concluded that more complex methods don't systematically outperform simpler methods
• Ji-Ping Lin shared details about a free dataset, the Taiwan Indigenous Peoples Open Research Data (which can be found here)
• John Bryant retraumatised the audience by talking about excess mortality during COVID-19 in New Zealand, where excess deaths were low, but interestingly mortality hasn't completely returned to the pre-COVID trend
• Andrew Sporle shared news about a forthcoming data portal for New Zealand that will include 25 years of data on 'amenable mortality' (preventable mortality)
• Marion Burkimsher summarised data on fertility change in New Zealand, noting that the fertility curve for New Zealand in 2024 most resembles the curve for England and Wales
• Several Stats NZ staff tried (with little success) to sell the audience on the administrative and survey data that will replace the five-yearly Census, although Hannes Diener clearly undersold the value of the experimental Administrative Population Census (which one of my PhD students has been working with)

Aside from the conference, here's what caught my eye in research over the past week:

• Bajaj, Jena, and Reilly (open access) use data from a now-defunct online gambling platform that created 'share prices' for soccer players, and find that the skin tone of the player matters with the darker the shade, the lower the player’s online purchase price
• Guthmann and Scheidel (with ungated earlier version here) develop a theoretical model of the economics of Greco-Roman slavery in the ancient world
• Wang, Sarker, and Hosoi (open access) find a positive and statistically significant effect of investment in analytics on NBA team performance
• Nilsson and Biyong (with ungated earlier version here) find that training hairdressers to be mental health first responders improved hairdresser-customer interactions, but had no effect on the mental health of customers, and worsened mental health outcomes for hairdressers