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

This week in research #135

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

• Katz and Jung (open access) estimate the macroeconomic impact of generative AI using cross-country data over the period 2022 to 2025, finding that generative AI contributed to increasing the productivity of most workers, regardless of their education, contract type, full or partial work time, and vulnerability level
• Dills and Raghav (with ungated earlier version here) find that state legalization of recreational marijuana in the US substantially reduced arrests and disciplinary incidents for drug law violations on college and university campuses
• Wang and Wong find an overall negative association between financial literacy and use of Buy-Now-Pay-Later services in the US
• Funahashi and Cardazzi (with ungated earlier version here) find that sports stadiums increase the value of nearby properties in Japan
• Sayre (with ungated earlier version here) finds no evidence that Airbnb entry leads to a substantial increase in eviction filings overall, but that there is a modest increase in eviction filings in neighbourhoods with a high poverty rate and/or a high concentration of renter households
• Hampole, Truffa, and Wong (with ungated earlier version here) find that female MBAs are 24 percent less likely than male MBAs to enter senior management within 15 years of graduation, and that having a larger proportion of female MBA section peers increases the likelihood of entering senior management for women but not for men

This week in research #134

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

• Wu and Lee use a theoretical model to show that higher military spending stimulates aggregate demand, thereby promoting employment and income growth, particularly among low-income groups, and consequently reducing income inequality
• Wang (open access) finds using data from British Columbia that having larger proportions of female peers has a large positive effect on students' choice of a STEM major
• Clark and Nielsen (open access) conduct a meta-analysis on the returns to education, including 79 studies that use changes in the minimum school leaving age to identify effects, finding that the average return to an additional year of education is 8.2 percent
• Giuranno and Manni (open access) review the literature on the impact of TikTok on elections, concluding that TikTok functions as a fast-moving marketplace for political ideas in which algorithmic incentives may shape conditions relevant to electoral integrity
• Collischon and Zimmermann (open access) unsurprisingly find zero effects of western Zodiac signs on wages, education, and managerial status among workers in Germany
• Garcia et al. find that both social trust and civic pride contribute to the willingness to pay to prevent the relegation of a professional football (soccer) team, with social trust more relevant for those who attend games

Also, I am delighted to report that my Master's student, Josh McNamara, won the Jan Whitwell Prize for the best student research paper at the New Zealand Association of Economists conference last week. Josh has blossomed into a standout research student over the last couple of years, and will no doubt do great things in a PhD programme in the near future. Congratulations Josh!

Finally, I can also report a marker of my own mild fame. While in Scotland last week, I visited my ancestral family lands at Achnacarry in the western highlands, and the Clan Cameron Museum. My wife asked if they would add me to their list of famous Camerons, and after looking me up online (including my blog!), they agreed! So, I join the likes of former UK prime minister David Cameron, Pearl Jam drummer Matt Cameron, and others on the list.

This week in research #133

This week I attended the 18th International Conference on Education and New Learning Technologies in Palma de Mallorca. Often, conferences in holiday locations are little more than an academic junket, but this conference certainly bucks that trend, which is why I keep coming back to it every few years. As you might expect given the title of the conference, this year it was heavily dominated by research on generative AI in education (at all levels, from K-12 to postgraduate). My own presentation was on the impact of introducing Harriet, our ECONS101 tutor, on student performance and experiences in ECONS101. I'll be giving a longer version of that presentation at a seminar at the University of Exeter in the UK later today. Anyway, here are some of the highlights I found from the conference:

• Chris Godfrey outlined the factors associated with student persistence at Manchester Business School, showing that at-risk students can be identified early by the extent of their engagement in their studies, as well as quantitative difficulties
• Ioannis Famelis presented on designing a custom GPT and Perplexity Space that can guide students on questions related to their graduate studies, specifically on curriculum regulations and identifying the most appropriate thesis supervisor
• Deniz Iren presented in detail on the development of custom AI tutors using a bespoke platform that looks very promising, called WiseTutor.ai
• Jonathon Cohen discussed how scenario-based learning and assessment could be used to maintain authenticity of assessment and real-world contexts in the face of generative AI
• Soeren Dressler looked at student perceptions of oral examinations as an assessment tool, and found that students had a strong preference for written examinations over oral examinations, potentially due to fear of the oral examination format, but students also believed that oral examinations were better at ensuring their learning
• Marian Hurley presented on student perceptions of continuous assessment, showing that students recognised the challenges to continuous assessment arising from generative AI, and showed a strong preference for a move to more invigilated assessment

Aside from the conference, here's what caught my eye in research over the past week:

• The Nobel lectures by Joel Mokyr, Philippe Aghion, and Peter Howitt
• Bluhm, Lessmann, and Schaudt (with ungated earlier version here) find that cities that gain the status of being a capital city grow faster in the medium term, and this growth spills over to nearby cities, and this arises through migration of educated individuals to capital cities and increased public and private investment

This week in research #132

Here's what caught my eye in research over the past week (a very quiet one, as I've been travelling in the UK, which also explains the lack of blog posts this week):

• Skryabin tests the proposition that 'stolen food tastes better', finding that 'high-risk covert taking' increases pleasantness of food by 39.3 percent compared with legitimate consumption
• Cortinhas et al. (open access) find that lecture absenteeism at UK universities is strongly associated with access to recorded lectures, inconvenient scheduling, less engaging sessions, and high student workload (no surprises there), and that tutorial attendance is higher when tutorials feature exclusive content, interactive problem-solving, and opportunities to ask questions

This week in research #131

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

• Chan (open access) finds that, between 1870 and 1910, ports which increased their proportion of steam in shipping volumes increased trade by diversifying their trade flows in terms of the range of trading partner countries and products traded
• Brodeur, Kattan, and Musumeci (with ungated earlier version here) study the relationship between statistical significance and placement outcomes for 200 empirical economics job market papers from 2018-2021, finding that marginally significant results are associated with higher academic placement likelihoods, providing a strong incentive for young researchers to 'p-hack' for statistical significance
• Gershoni and Stryjan (with ungated earlier version here) find significant declines in both exam attendance and demonstrated knowledge following the switch to online instruction during the COVID-19 pandemic in Israel

This week in research #130

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

• Fumarco and Groero (open access) describe a Stata package that reduces a dataset down to just those variables that are used in a particular .do file (useful for creating replication packages while minimising data bloat)
• Cox (open access) describes three Stata commands that creates a new dataset of the quantiles, percentiles, or confidence intervals for a particular variable or result (if you've ever needed to do this, you will know how frustrating it is)
• Yarashov, Baryshnikova, and Kakhkharov find that military expansion exerts a significant negative impact on fertility across 15 post-Soviet countries between 1992 and 2022
• Chatterjee, Dimova, and Ojha (open access) find, using a correspondence study in urban India, that equally qualified single mothers are much less likely to receive interview callbacks than unmarried women without children, married women, and married mothers
• Charness et al. (with ungated earlier version here) provide a convincing argument of the virtues of lab experiments in economics
• In a companion piece, Gneezy examines the principles of experimental economics
• Wang finds that China's policy to limit young peoples’ access to online video games did not produce detectable effects on academic performance, study time, or health
• Pritchett and Viarengo (open access) demonstrate that ad hoc poverty lines, including the World Bank's poverty lines, are far too low to be plausible candidates for an inclusive global poverty line

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)

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

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

Edmund Phelps, 1933-2026

Economics has recently lost another of the greats, Nobel Prize-winning economist Edmund Phelps, who passed away last week. Phelps was a macroeconomist, and among his many contributions he helped to formalise the concept of the natural rate of unemployment. Phelps won the Nobel Prize in 2006 for "his analysis of intertemporal tradeoffs in macroeconomic policy".

Surprisingly, for a Nobel Prize winner there have been few obituaries online so far. However, the New York Times has a good one (albeit paywalled). Phelps was 92, and had been among the oldest living economics Nobel laureates. Vernon Smith (born in 1927, so 99 years old), and Robert Aumann (born in 1930, so 95 years old) are the only economics Nobel Prize winners who are older.

The inter-temporal trade-offs that Phelps won his Nobel Prize for were not the only trade-offs that he considered in his research. Phelps also had a lot to say about one of the most famous trade-offs in macroeconomics - the short-run trade-off between inflation and unemployment that is embodied in the Phillips Curve (named after the New Zealand economist Bill Phillips). Phelps provided a keen critique of the short-run Phillips Curve, in particular noting that policymakers could not exploit the relationship permanently and, for example, 'buy' lower unemployment at a cost of higher inflation. He argued (successfully) for greater consideration of the role of inflation expectations in the relationship between inflation and unemployment (which my ECONS101 students will encounter next week). This critique contributed to our understanding that the Phillips Curve is vertical in the long run.

Phelps also contributed the 'Golden Rule' saving rate in the Solow growth model, which is the saving rate that maximises sustainable consumption per capita in the long run, as well as some of the key ideas underlying statistical discrimination (for more on that, see this post, or this one).

Phelps’s passing is a reminder that many of the ideas we now teach as standard macroeconomics were derived from hard-won arguments about expectations and the limits of policy.

This week in research #126

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

• Klebl, Jetten, and Kirkland (open access) find that citizens living in nations with greater (vs. lower) levels of economic inequality were more likely to attribute responsibility for climate change mitigation to individual people rather than to governments (and businesses)
• Andersen, Grimsrud, and Lindhjem find that residential property prices in Norway decline in proximity to operating wind farms, with prices lower by 4 to 14 percent for properties within 2 km of a wind farm, and with effects declining to zero by 7 km from a windfarm

Try this: The Mother of Econ

US high school student Saras Tolley has created a collection of AI-powered economics tools called The Mother of Econ. The tools include a 'shock simulator', which takes any news headline and determines what the supply and demand effects are, an 'econ paper decoder', which takes any NBER working paper, or journal article in the Journal of Economic Perspectives or American Economic Review, and creates a plain English summary, and ten other tools.

I put the 'shock simulator' through its paces. After all, if an AI can evaluate the economic implications of a news article using supply and demand, what will I do on this blog? Just kidding, there is lots that I could do. But nevertheless, the results were uneven. Faced with the news headline that I blogged about here, the shock simulator correctly drew a demand increase. However, when presented with the news headline that I blogged about here, it drew a supply decrease rather than a demand increase. So, I guess there is still a little more work required before my supply-and-demand blogging is replaced by AI!

Some of the other tools are really good to play with, including the 'shadow Fed', which applies the Taylor rule to determine what the US fed should do with interest rates and tracks that against actual Fed behaviour. There's also a 'US econ dashboard', which tracks economic statistics by state, and allows you to drill down to the county level (but only for some states, and only for some counties within states that have data - I was disappointed to find data on only six counties in New York, for instance).

Nevertheless, this is an interesting collection of tools, all powered by Gemini, and available for you to use at no (monetary) cost. Enjoy!

[HT: Marginal Revolution]

This week in research #125

Here's what caught my eye in research over the past week (which was clearly another quiet week):

• Sinclair et al. (open access) compile a dataset of monthly birth rates by maternal age and parity for the Australian state of Victoria over the period from 1983 to 2020, and apply a variety of different time series models to the data, finding that Australian family policy has mainly altered the timing of births rather than reversing the long-run fertility decline, and that the Australian 'Baby Bonus' led to only a short-lived impact, concentrated among second births

This week in research #124

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

• Greenaway-McGrevy (open access) evaluates the impact of this widespread zoning reform in Auckland on housing starts, and finds that upzoning approximately doubled new dwelling permits per capita within five years

In an otherwise quiet week I have some exciting news. The latest issue of Australasian Journal of Regional Studies (AJRS) has just been published (backdated to December 2025). This issue has four papers (all open access), as well as the editorial:

• Duong et al. examine output divergence and club convergence across 63 provinces in Vietnam during the study period 2010–2023. The question of whether subnational regions move along a single common development path is important because it can help us to understand spatial inequality. In the case of Vietnam, this paper demonstrates that Vietnamese provinces are sorting into convergence clubs, suggesting that subnational growth in Vietnam is shaped by location, investment, and proximity to major economic centres rather than by uniform national catch-up (this paper won the John Dickinson Memorial Award for the best paper published in AJRS in 2025)
• Kanthilanka and Kingwell explore the export grain supply chain across Australian states. They find that grain producers in Australia benefitted from an increase in the velocity of Australia’s export grain supply chains. However, this presents a risk of higher food inflation if a prolonged drought were to strike eastern Australia, unless there is greater investment in grain storage and increased grain production
• Dutta explores the rural urbanisation process and the development of rural non-agricultural activities in West Bengal, India, an area of substantial urban growth. They find that districts with better infrastructure have higher percentages of non-agricultural enterprises employing hired workers, reinforcing the link between infrastructure and non-agricultural activity growth
• Leutwiler examines economic development planning for the Katherine region of the Northern Territory of Australia from 2014 to 2021 and contrasts this with a place-based development approach. This analysis highlights that formal economic strategies in the Katherin region are focused primarily on industries and projects that increase revenue for higher levels of government and large corporations, rather than creating local employment. This paper is important, as it provides justification for place-based development that prioritises local employment, diversification, and more sustainable regional outcomes

This week in research #123

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

• James and Watson (with ungated earlier version here) find using an online survey experiment that state-administered cash transfers (such as Alaska’s Permanent Fund Dividend Program) likely attract new residents
• Wang et al. find that the online and mobile game Genshin Impact had a significant positive effect on China's product exports, likely by fostering a more favourable perception of China among people in other countries
• Liu et al. find a significant child penalty in the rental housing market in China, with couples with children 8.0 percentage points less likely to receive a response from landlords, and 5.9 percentage points less likely to be invited to an open house

This week in research #122

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

• Prati and Senik (with ungated earlier version here) propose a rescaling of happiness data using retrospective and current life evaluations, and show using their rescaled data that, among other results, the happiness of Americans has substantially increased from the 1950s to the early 2000s
• Johannesen and Muchardt (open access) test whether female scholars in economics are held to higher standards than males in the US and Europe, and find no evidence that standards are higher for females across faculty appointments, network invitations, grant awards, and editor appointments
• Choi finds that adding a healthcare copayment of $1 in Korea reduces monthly outpatient visits by 10 percent, with effects concentrates in low-value care, such as the inappropriate use of antibiotics
• Ozsoy and Rodríguez-Planas (with ungated earlier version here) find that students who took advantage of a flexible grading policy at Queen's College (City University of New York) during the COVID-19 pandemic underperformed once the policy was no longer available, with a cumulative GPA 0.11 standard deviations lower in Spring 2021 than in Fall 2019 relative to the change in performance of students who never used the policy
• Alonso-Armesto, Cáceres-Delpiano, and Lekfuangfu (open access) find substantial gains in mathematics and science achievement, concentrated among male students and those from lower socioeconomic backgrounds when the minimum legal drinking age increases from 16 to 18 years
• Mitra (with ungated earlier version here) finds that more educated mayors in Italy boost public investment, especially in the education sector, without compromising the fiscal stability of the municipalities

This week in research #121

Here's what caught my eye in research over the past week (a quiet week, as I have been travelling in Europe):

• Three articles published in the prestigious journal Nature by Miske et al., Aczel et al., and Tyner et al., investigate the replicability of research results in social and behavioural sciences (a very important set of papers that have garnered a lot of attention)
• Mišák (open access) investigates the impact of temperature on soccer team performance, and finds that attacking efficiency is enhanced in warmer conditions, leading to increased goal productivity and improved shot conversion rates, defensive performance appears to weaken in warmer conditions, with a decrease in defensive pressure and passing accuracy, and player aggression follows an inverted U-shaped pattern in relation to temperature

This week in research #120

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

• Büyükeren, Makarin, and Xiong (with ungated earlier version here) find that the full-scale launch of Tinder led to a sharp, persistent increase in sexual activity among college students, but with little corresponding impact on the formation of long-term relationships or relationship quality
• Chollete et al. find that recreational marijuana legalisation by US states increases property crime, although the effect disappears when they control for state-specific time trends
• Picault (open access) describes a method to introduce authentic group projects in senior undergraduate economics courses

This week in research #118

Here's what caught my eye in research over the past week (a quiet week, following last week's bumper edition):

• Rubenstein and Stephenson assess the effect of Taylor Swift’s relationship with Travis Kelce on the Kansas City Chiefs’ television audience, and find that viewership increases by about one-third beginning with Swift’s first time attending a Chiefs’ game
• Bussoli and Fattobene (open access) find that Financial Graph Literacy is lower among older adults, those with less education, and lower-income groups, and is significantly associated with a greater likelihood of engaging in proactive financial behaviours such as saving, investing, budgeting, and using digital financial tools