This week in research #105

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

• Gillespie et al. (with ungated earlier version here) find evidence of landlord exit from the rental market, specifically after rent controls were tightened in 2021 in Ireland, meaning that rent controls are associated with more sale listings and fewer rental listings/registrations
• Pagani and Pica (open access) find that exposure to a higher share of same-gender math high achievers is related to better academic performance among Italian primary school children, for both boys and girls, three years later
• Dutta, Gandhi, and Green (open access) find, using data from India, that relaxing rent control leads to higher rents and decreases rural-urban migration, while easing eviction laws increases the conversion of rental units into owner-occupied housing and increases the prevalence of 'marriage migrants'
• Couture and Smit find no evidence that Federal Open Market Committee officials in the US select securities that earn abnormal returns
• Bergvall et al. (open access) find, using Swedish data, that find that following the start of their PhD studies, psychiatric medication use among PhD students increases substantially, continuing throughout their studies to the point that by the fifth year medication use has increased by 40 percent compared to pre-PhD levels (more reason to worry about the mental health of PhD students)
• Bagues and Villa (open access) find that, after Spanish regions increased the minimum legal drinking age from 16 to 18 years, alcohol consumption among adolescents aged 14-17 decreased by 7 to 17 percent and exam performance improved by 4 percent of a standard deviation
• Fan, Tang, and Zhang find, using data on university relocations in China in the 1950s, that there were substantial effects on total employment, firm numbers, and productivity in industries technologically related to the relocated departments
• Chikish and Humphreys find that surgical repair of UCL injuries extends post-injury MLB pitcher careers by roughly 1.3 seasons relative to matched uninjured pitchers, and that post-injury and treatment pitcher performance improves by roughly 8 percent
• Chegere et al. (open access) conduct an experiment investigating how regular sports bettors in urban Tanzania value sports bets and form expectations about winning probabilities and find that people assign higher certainty equivalents and winning probabilities to sports bets than to urn-and-balls lotteries with identical odds, even though, in fact, they are not more likely to win
• Seak et al. (with ungated earlier version here) find that experimental choices by both humans and monkeys violated the independence axiom across a broad range of reward probabilities (both monkeys and humans are not purely rational decision-makers)