This week in research #136

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

• Baker et al. (with ungated earlier version here) find that following legalisation, sports betting does not displace other gambling or consumption but significantly reduces savings, as risky bets crowd out positive expected value investments, and that these effects are concentrated among frequent bettors and low-savings households
• Alfani (open access) summarises the state of research on social mobility and income inequality in preindustrial societies, and identifies several promising avenues for new research
• Bostwick and Nguyen (with ungated earlier version here) find that when a student enrols in a triweekly (rather than biweekly) university class, they earn lower grades and are less likely to take a subsequent course in that same field
• Kaffine and Rao (with ungated earlier version here) find that the observed distribution of satellite orbits is well explained by profit-maximising satellite operator behaviour, and that collision risk plays a key deterrent role
• Yang et al. (open access) find that having daughters slightly increases the preference for gender equality and homosexual rights, using data across 39 countries from the European Social Survey
• Di Tella, Gàlvez, and Schargrodsky (with ungated earlier version here) find, using a laboratory experiment, that two strategies often proposed to reduce political polarisation on social media, removing access to the platform and exposing users to counter-attitudinal content, do not reduce polarisation and may instead produce mild increases
• Perroni et al. (open access) find, using a sample of 40,000 job vacancies in Vietnam, that physically attractive women are offered higher salaries, whereas physically attractive men are not
• Sentana and Gómez-Bengoechea comparing the behaviour of a groups of professional soccer players and inexperienced college students when they play the same two-person zero-sum game in both a soccer stadium (the field) and a video game (the lab), and find that while both groups behave consistently with the implications of mixed strategy equilibrium in the field, their behaviour rejects the theory in the lab