This week in research #106

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

• Steenbrink and Skali (open access) look at the relationship between wealth inequality and economic growth, finding that a one standard deviation increase in the wealth Gini coefficient within countries is associated with a 0.34 percentage points decline in growth rates
• Liu and Wang (with ungated earlier version here) use website traffic and Google Trends data to investigate who is using generative AI, and find that users skew young, highly educated, and male, particularly for video generation tools, and that country-level adoption intensity is strongly correlated with the share of youth population, digital infrastructure, English fluency, foreign direct investment inflows, services’ share of GDP, and human capital
• Baumann and Svec examine peer effects in the real-time strategy computer game StarCraft 2 and find that having higher quality teammates is associated with a rise in the player’s ratings over the next two weeks and that the impact grows over time
• Cook examines the effect of home stadium attendance on a variety of match outcomes in the NFL, using the COVID-affected 2020 season as an instrumental variable, and finds that home stadium fans influence the outcomes of NFL games in favour of the home team, by directly affecting the away team's performance
• Risse (open access) finds that adding unpaid work and care to paid work, and adjusting for the undervaluation of female-concentrated jobs and the male wage premium, sees women’s share of total labour input expand from 36.8 per cent to 50.5 per cent in Australia
• Melnikov, Schmidt-Padilla, and Sviatschi (open access) find that individuals in gang-controlled neighbourhoods in El Salvador have less material well-being, income, and education than individuals living only 50 meters away but outside of gang territory
• Rubenstein and Nesbit (open access) find that the new Guardian Caps in the NFL do not significantly lower concussion rates, and in fact increase concussions in the position groups where using Guardian Caps was mandated

And the latest paper from my own research (jointly with my former PhD student Muhammad Irfan and my colleague Waqar Akram):

• Our new article (open access) in the Journal of Energy and Development looks at the adoption of household solar energy in Pakistan, and shows that, as income and education increase, grid-sourced electricity will remain the preferred source of household energy, but since grid-source electricity is unavailable in rural areas, solar energy would need more government support in those areas