This week in research #128

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

• Ruggles tests Richard Easterlin's argument that the economic and social prospects of a generation are influenced by the size of the cohort relative to adjacent cohorts, and finds using US data from 1910 to 2040 that the theory fits the data well for the period from 1940 to 1980 but fails in later decades, although baby boomers exiting the labour force will likely lead to increases in wages in the future
• de Bondt and Sun (with ungated earlier version here) use ChatGPT to classify activity sentiment scores from Purchasing Managers’ Index (PMI) news releases, then use those scores to 'nowcast' GDP, finding that on average, out-of-sample forecast accuracy improves by about 20% apart from the two most recent years
• Skali et al. (open access) find that better-looking Swiss politicians are not more prone to rent-seeking through interest group affiliations, and do not deviate more from their voters' preferences
• Jin, Karim, and Schulze (open access) find that Islamist terror attacks created significant negative abnormal returns in American and European markets, but the stock market effects of other terror attacks were almost nil

In other news, I wrote a quick take on the New Zealand Budget as part of The Conversation's coverage this week. That article also has a drop-down menu at the bottom that summarises the key Budget announcements in each area