This week in research #90

This week I attended the European Regional Science Association (ERSA) conference in Athens. The ERSA conference is the largest regional science conference (surprisingly, larger than the RSAI International Conference), and this year had 930 attendees from over 50 countries. Not many would have travelled further than the small contingent of New Zealanders. However, as always, the conference was totally worth the long trip, and I've come away inspired and re-energised in my research. With such a large programme, it was impossible to attend all of the sessions that I wanted to. Nevertheless, here are some of the highlights I found from the conference:

• Nikolaos Terzidis (abstract on page 181 of the abstract book) showed that trade exposure has shifted voting patterns to the right (decreases in voting for radical left parties, and increases in voting for radical right parties) in Greece, with no apparent increase in polarisation
• Anna Lewczuk (abstract on page 540 of the abstract book) showed that exposure to the war in Ukraine (proxied by proximity to the Poland-Ukraine border) increased voting for Eurosceptic parties in Poland
• Pedro Fierro (working paper here) showed that bonding social capital (social capital within groups) was positively associated with Donald Trump's 'margin vote' in the 2020 Presidential election, while bridging social capital (social capital between groups) was negatively associated with the 'margin vote'
• In an interesting session organised by The Regional Science Academy, Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman described the US as becoming "a hermit kingdom"
• Lukáš Makovský (abstract on page 304 of the abstract book) showed that higher house prices and construction constraints impede migration in England and Wales, and that the impacts are larger for lower-skilled households than for higher-skilled households (this research also has high relevance for New Zealand)
• Daniel Ruiz Palomo (abstract on page 411 of the abstract book) showed that Spanish municipalities that experienced a one-minute lower relative average travel time due to high-speed rail grew three percentage points more in population over a 30-year period (and I learned that Spain has the second largest high-speed rail network, behind only China)
• Jacques-François Thisse gave a wonderful and wide-ranging keynote lecture on the development of regional science and spatial economics (but was, in my view, a little unfair to economists, who hadn't totally ignored developments in regional science in the 1970s and 1980s)

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

• Allen and Webber (open access) test the 'wisdom of the crowd' by looking at predictions of final rank positions in the English Premier League, and find that experts and bookmakers outperformed a crowd of prediction game players
• Arrondel, Duhautois, and Laslier (with ungated earlier version here) develop a theoretical model that shows that football clubs that include not only profit but also sporting performance in their objectives end up generating more profit than others who purely maximise profit
• Hanedar, Göktan, and İnce (with ungated earlier version here) find that investors anticipated the outbreak of World War I, with bond prices following a continuously downward trend from 1911