This week in research #127

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

• Ertl, Holb, and Bakó (with ungated version here) find, using a field experiment, that using a loss-framing in higher education assessments improves academic performance throughout the semester and on final assessments
• Donadelli, Mammi, and Paradiso (open access) investigate the impact of major wars and pandemics on supply and demand dynamics in G7 economies since the 1800s, and find that they primarily and persistently damage the supply side of the economy
• Bouchard, Yun, and Shelton (with ungated earlier version here) find that a 20-percentage point increase in the Trump two-party vote share correlates with an 8 percent increase in post-election domestic violence, following Trump's 2020 Presidential election loss

The American Economic Association papers and proceedings were published this week, which included the following papers of interest:

• Mayer, Méjean, and Thoenig find that a sufficiently strong and targeted set of sanctions, such as the 2024 sanctions imposed on Russia, would have increased Russia’s opportunity cost of war enough to deter a full-blown conflict in Ukraine
• Aksoy et al. find that younger CEOs, and younger firms, are more likely to allow their employees to work from home
• Li and Xu find that condensing a community college course into a shorter format improves course persistence, performance, and subsequent course outcomes in in-person settings, but not in online settings
• El Khoury confirms that female professors receive systematically lower teaching quality ratings than male professors, and that there is little difference in this by gender or minority status, but students who have ever posted a rating of a professor on a website penalise female professors by more than those who have not
• Underwood, Marshall, and Bilen find that redesignating economics as a STEM subject significantly increases the number of economics degrees conferred to women and non-resident students
• Ahlstrom, Asarta, and Harter investigate the use of AI in undergraduate economics courses, and find that there is a range of views about AI, but overall more experienced instructors are less inclined to integrate AI into their teaching or to adopt an open stance toward student use of AI tools to complete assignments
• Owen, Skoy, and Zhan find that easy-to-implement interventions can increase the probability that female students take additional economics courses beyond the introductory class, but that additional interventions do not have an incremental effect
• Orlov and McKee find that concurrent supplemental courses (on essential maths skills) can meaningfully improve outcomes for students at risk of underperforming in introductory microeconomics