This week in research #145

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

• Guzman, McGuinness, and Turner investigate 16 'mega-universities' in the US, and report that students at these mega-universities have lower average completion rates and leave with higher average student loan debt compared to students at other schools
• Melo et al. (open access) find little evidence that higher minimum wages increase job search for low-skilled jobs, and more evidence that higher minimum wages decrease the number of workers seeking employment in these jobs (file this under surprising results on the supply side of the labour market)
• Malesky et al. (with ungated earlier version here) find that cohorts exposed to the university expansion in Vietnam are 87% more likely to have a university education, but that education increases the incidence of bribe requests and perceptions of corruption

This week in research #144

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

• Tompsett (open access) finds that the opening of new bridges over major rivers increase per capita economic activity

Also new from the Waikato working papers series:

• Luengo et al. investigate the causal impact of AI advice on price discovery in a controlled asset-market experiment, and find that access to AI advice significantly reduces mispricing relative to the baseline, regardless of whether the AI advice was aligned with long-term fundamentals, or myopic and based on current prices

This week in research #143

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

• Magnuson and Ruggles (open access) explore the creation of the first census microdata sample at the US Census Bureau in the early 1960s (I had no idea it was so long ago!)
• Coelli and Borland (open access) find that the decline in the estimated return to a bachelor's degree in Australia over the period from 2001 to 2016 is potentially explained by strong earnings growth in low‐skill occupations, due to increases in real minimum and award wages, as well as possibly the mining boom
• Bonilla-Mejía et al. (with ungated earlier version here) find that rising violence increases intentions, plans, and preparations to emigrate from Central America, particularly to the United States
• Delavande et al. (with ungated version here) find that student attendance at a public UK university is highly dependent on timetable structure, that students compensate for marginal non-attendance at some events with increased attendance at others within the same module, and that timetable features and attendance choices do not have systematic impacts on academic achievement
• Dang (with ungated earlier version here) finds that one additional international student per thousand working-age residents of a US local labour market increases the employment-to-population ratio by 0.19 percentage points and average hourly wages by 0.48 percent
• Frank and Vickery (open access) look at how LGB students differ from their heterosexual counterparts using data from the UK from 2012 to 2020, and find that LGB men and women both have large shifts towards Humanities subjects, where they perform better, and away from law, economics, management, and STEM, and that they have lower early-career salaries than heterosexual students

This week in research #142

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

• Sacerdote, Staiger, and Tine (with ungated earlier version here) find that test score–optional policies harm the likelihood of admission for high-achieving applicants from disadvantaged backgrounds, meaning that the availability of test scores on an application can promote rather than hinder social mobility
• Armona et al. (with ungated earlier version here) develop and test a model of what is newsworthy to a media outlet
• Crossin et al. (open access if you set up a free account) find using data from a nationally representative sample that an estimated 71.1 percent of the New Zealand population think politicians should do more to keep people safe from alcohol harm, with majority support across the political spectrum
• Smit (open access) outlines the drawbacks to remote working that may have prevented greater internal migration from cities to the periphery in the Netherlands

This week in research #141

This week I attended the 65th Congress of the European Regional Science Association in Sofia, Bulgaria. This is one of my favourite conferences each year, because of the quality and variety of papers that are presented. My own presentation was on the increasing trend towards natural population decrease (more deaths than births) across the territorial authorities and local boards in New Zealand, which will become an increasingly serious policy issue in the future. Here are some of the highlights I found from the conference:

• Ugo Fratesi (abstract 270, on page 2 of the abstract book) looked at regional resilience to positive shocks in China, flipping on its head the idea of resilience, which is usually only applied to negative shocks (and this generated a bit of discussion about whether resilience is the right word to use in that context)
• Elisabetta Ottoz (abstract 126, on page 8 of the abstract book) investigated businesses operating in the night-time economy in Italian cities, finding that those businesses were larger and more profitable than recreational businesses that operated during the daytime or evenings
• Peter Nijkamp gave a very detailed keynote that focused on wellbeing and introduced me to a variety of new terms drawn from disparate parts of the literature, including 'city love' (because love is more enduring than happiness), spatial comfort zones (where people are unwilling to move away, because they have everything they need within some close distance), prosilience (like resilience, but more about making the most out of a negative shock so that the area ends up better rather than simply returning to the previous state), and panarchy (adjustment behaviour is cyclical both temporally and spatially)
• In his discussion of Nijkamp's keynote, Kingsley Haynes laid down a challenge, noting that regional scientists had done a great job of analysing aggregate data, but not so much with individual-level data (which reminded me of at least two conversations I have had over the years about how difficult or impossible it is to apply spatial models to individual-level data)
• Zhiwu Wei (working paper here) looked at the relationship between local wealth inequality and protests in the Global South, finding that the positive inequality-protest relationship is very localised, and weakens substantially as you consider a broader definition of what is 'local'
• Alessandra Faggian (abstract 537, on page 93 of the abstract book) investigated the relationship between fertility and productivity in Italy, using historical wheat suitability as an instrument, and found that higher local productivity leads to significantly higher fertility rates (I'm not sure there is a policy prescription here, because raising productivity seems to be just as difficult as raising fertility!)
• Simone Piras (abstract 111, on page 130 of the abstract book) presented the results of a discrete choice experiment of Scottish residents’ willingness to move (or not) to places that differ in terms of various attributes, finding that residents would be more willing to move to places with good natural environment and digital connectivity and which are close to services and family, and that an intervention that provided information about Scotland's national policy on balancing the population had only small impacts

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

• Gans (open access) shows using a theoretical model that prompt injection to manipulate AI referees of journal article submissions can actually improve the peer review process under certain conditions (I'd want to see some empirical support for this before I believed it)
• Di Iasio and Wahba (open access) find that stronger anti-immigration attitudes significantly reduce migration inflows to EU destinations, with effects that are larger for intra-EU mobility than for migration from non-EU countries
• Wang and Liang find that city-level crime rates declined by a statistically significant 5.7 percent following Hukou reform in China, which freed up internal migration
• Ardito et al. (with ungated earlier version here) find that delayed retirement as a result of pension reform in Italy significantly increased sick leave due to occupational injuries, by 2.6 percent of the pre-reform mean

This week in research #140

Here's what caught my eye in research over the past week (another quiet week, it seems):

• Higney et al. (open access) estimate the marginal value of bird song, using a choice experiment with a 'simulated soundscape'

Also new from the Waikato working papers series:

• Gibson, Boe-Gibson, and Scrimgeour use night-time lights to measure the urban expansion and contraction of urban areas in New Zealand, finding that rapid expansion is concentrated in commuter towns surrounding major cities and amenity-oriented settlements, while some smaller towns experience contraction associated with economic restructuring and changing locational advantages

This week in research #139

Here's what caught my eye in research over the past week (a quiet week, it seems):

• List (open access) comments on how to address the generalisability of research
• Lehner et al. (open access) find that the opening of a Walmart Supercenter is associated with a 2.2 percentage point (18%) increase in poverty, and that the increase is largest for younger and less-educated adults

And the latest paper from my own research (led by my former PhD student Muhammad Irfan, along with Ushan Goonawardane, and Craig Robertson), which was also covered in the New Zealand Herald:

• Our new article (open access if you register for free) in the New Zealand Medical Journal performs a comparison of methamphetamine contamination of 423 properties across New Zealand, before and after the requirement to test for methamphetamine was eased in May 2018, and finds a significant increase in methamphetamine contamination

This week in research #137

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

• Avina et al. (open access) conduct a meta-analysis of studies into public attitudes toward immigrants in host societies, finding that while preferences are broadly similar across countries and demographic groups, economic considerations have become more influential over time, and evaluations of individual immigrants differ sharply depending on where people stand on the broader immigration debate
• Márquez and Scartascini (open access) evaluated a randomised controlled trial of a behavioural economics course for public officials in Latin America and the Caribbean, finding that the course improves applied reasoning and problem-solving
• De Boer et al. (open access) compare trust behaviour towards AI (ChatGPT 4o) and human receivers using a trust game in an experimental setting, finding no significant differences in trust behaviour either between individuals and groups or between AI and human receivers
• Voorintholt et al. (open access) find that reported climate change worries are on average significantly higher when people are asked whether they 'worry about climate change', compared with when they are asked if they agree that 'climate change 'worries me' (survey wording matters!)
• Morris (open access) challenges whether the concept of 'alcohol use disorder' is confused
• Anagol, Ferreira, and Rexer (with ungated earlier version here) estimate the economic value of zoning reform in São Paulo, finding that the reform increased the aggregate housing stock by 1.6 percent, reduced house prices by 0.4 percent, and produced welfare gains of 0.65 percent of city GDP
• Murphy (with ungated earlier version here) evaluates a randomised control trial in rural Kenya in which selected households received cognitive behavioural therapy and medication to reduce alcohol abuse, finding that the program decreased the likelihood of positive spot breathalyser tests among men by 14 percentage points, the likelihood of heavy drinking by 19 percentage points, and increased household real annual harvest values by 32 percent

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 compare 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 a larger proportion 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