This week in research #101

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

• Kuehn (open access) discusses the under-recognised contributions of W.E.B. Du Bois to marginalist wage theory
• Sintos (open access) provides a meta-regression analysis of the effects of population diversity on economic growth, finding that ethnic and linguistic diversity exhibit a small and statistically insignificant positive effect on economic growth, while religious, genetic, birthplace, and other forms of diversity exert a significant positive impact on growth, with effect sizes ranging from moderate to large
• Baltrunaite, Casarico, and Rizzica (with ungated earlier version here) study gender differences in reference letters for graduate students in economics and finance, and find that men are described more often as standout and women as grindstone, i.e., hardworking and diligent, that these differences are mainly driven by male letter writers, especially more senior ones, and that standout characteristics relate positively to subsequent career outcomes whereas grindstone characteristics relate negatively to subsequent career outcomes
• Asquith and Mast (with ungated earlier version here) study county-level population decline in the US, and find that falling fertility has caused migration rates that used to generate growth to instead result in decline, and that only 10 percent of counties would have declined during the 2010s if fertility had remained at its initial levels