This week in research #129

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

• Araya et al. (with ungated earlier version here, but in Spanish) evaluate the impact of using the CORE textbook (which I use in my ECONS101 class) in introductory microeconomics in Uruguay, in comparison with a conventional textbook, finding no systematic differences in pass or dropout rates between the two courses, but that students using CORE are significantly more likely to believe that it contributed to their academic and professional development
• Baker et al. (with ungated earlier version here) study the staggered rollout of unionisation across Canadian universities between 1970 and 2022, and find that unionisation compressed salaries, with wages at the bottom of the unconditional distribution increasing by roughly 10 percent, while wages at the top were unaffected
• Baker et al. (but a different Baker, and with ungated earlier version here) provide a detailed summary of different types of difference-in-differences (DiD) research designs and their associated estimators, as well as discussing covariates, weights, handling multiple periods, and staggered treatment (this will be a highly cited resource, given the number of studies that use DiD for causal inference)