This week in research #117

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

• Zhang et al. find that Uber’s entry into a US city significantly reduces crime rates, with larger effects in areas facing greater liquidity constraints (less bank credit supply, fewer local job opportunities, higher personal bankruptcy risk, and greater household financial stress)
• Sandorf and Navrud (open access) establish convergent validity between a contingent valuation survey and a discrete choice experiment (meaning that both measures are highly correlated), with the example they use being willingness-to-pay to reduce the spread of invasive crabs in Norway
• Desierto and Koyama (with ungated earlier version here) explain the economics of medieval castles in Europe
• Ordali and Rapallini (with ungated earlier version here) conduct a meta-analysis of the relationship between age and risk aversion, and confirm that there is a positive relationship in studies using survey data and lotteries
• Singh and Mukherjee conduct a replication of an earlier study that established 'action bias' among goalkeepers facing a penalty kick, and find that jumping left or right rather than staying in the centre of the goal is not a sub-optimal action for goalkeepers in FIFA World Cup matches, and so the high frequency of jumping is not indicative of action bias (it is good to see a replication study published in a good journal)
• Lindkvist et al. (open access) investigate attitudes toward research misconduct and questionable research practices among researchers and ethics reviewers across academic fields, and find that researchers and ethics reviewers in medicine, as well as more senior and female researchers and reviewers, took a more negative view of questionable research practices
• Lei et al. use China’s Compulsory Schooling Law as a quasi-natural experiment to investigate the effect of education on HIV/AIDS, finding that mass education significantly enhances knowledge about HIV/AIDS, and that each additional year of exposure to the law reduces HIV/AIDS and mortality rates by 6.51 percent and 2.15 percent respectively
• Daoud, Conlin, and Jerzak (open access) study the differential effects of World Bank and Chinese development projects in Africa between 2002 and 2013, using data across 9899 neighbourhoods in 36 African countries, and find that both donors raise wealth, with larger and more consistent gains for Chinese development projects
• Stoelinga and Tähtinen (open access) find that conflict exposure, on average, increases support for democracy in African countries, but the effects vary by ethnicity and regime type, but interestingly, violence increases trust in ruling institutions in autocratic regimes
• Ruiz et al. (with ungated earlier version here) find that, following the exodus of Cuban doctors from Brazil in 2018, the reduction in doctors was associated with persistent reductions in the care of chronic diseases, while service utilization for conditions requiring immediate care, such as maternal-related services and infections, quickly recovered
• Geddes and Holz (open access) investigate the effect of rent control on domestic violence in San Francisco, and find that there was a nearly 10 percent decrease in assaults on women for the average ZIP code (some good news for advocates of rent control, but it hardly offsets the bad outcomes)
• Clemens and Strain (with ungated earlier version here) add further to the literature on the disemployment effects of minimum wages, this time looking at the difference between large and small minimum wage changes, finding that relatively large minimum wage increases reduced usual hours worked per week among individuals with low levels of experience and education by just under one hour per week during the decade prior to the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, while the effects of smaller minimum wage increases are economically and statistically indistinguishable from zero