This week in research #95

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

• Frigo and Lodigiani (open access) find that exposure to paedophilia scandals in the Catholic Church is an important determinant for migration aspirations in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Mexico, especially for young adults
• Archsmith et al. (with ungated earlier version here) investigate how paying attention now may affect performance later using data from Major League Baseball, and find that umpires apply greater effort to higher-stakes decisions, but also that effort applied to earlier decisions increases errors later, implying that umpires have a limited budget of attention (like students!)
• Popov (with ungated earlier version here) finds that countries experienced a significant increase in exports to trading partners with a relatively high share of Catholics following a visit from Pope John Paul II
• Wooden, Ey, and Wilkins (open access), using data from the 2022 wave of HILDA in Australia, find that transgender or gender‐diverse people fare worse that cisgender people in twelve outcomes covering the labour market, income and finances, crime victimisation, and health and subjective well‐being
• Anderson (open access) estimates changes in demand that could result from lowering tax rates for mid-strength beer in Australia to match those of low-strength beer, finding that alcohol consumption from each of beer, wine and spirits could fall, but by only a little more than 1 percent in total
• Leigh argues that the increased availability of big data does not make randomisation obsolete (which also makes his book Randomistas, which I reviewed here, not obsolete!)
• Carlana and La Ferrara (with ungated earlier version here) study the Tutoring Online Program in Italy, targeting underprivileged students in grades 6 to 8, and find that three hours of individual tutoring per week increased math performance by 0.22 SD in 2020 and 0.20 SD in 2022

And in other news, the Sex, Drugs and Economics blog flew past one million pageviews in total this week! Just under two years ago, when I celebrated ten years of blogging, the blog had just under a half million pageviews. Wow!