This week in research #29

Again, this week on the blog has been quiet as I've been travelling. I'll be at the 12th International Conference on Population Geographies in Belfast this coming week, presenting a paper entitled "Subnational population ageing in New Zealand: Past, present, and future". In the meantime though, here's what caught my eye in research over the past week:

• Peng et al. (open access) find that a grant proposal’s percentage of promotional language is associated with up to a doubling of the grant’s probability of being funded, and that the percentage of promotional language is predictive of the expected citation and productivity impact of publications that are supported by funded grants
• Sarsons (open access) summarises 2024 Nobel Prize winner Claudia Goldin’s contributions to our understanding of women’s labour market outcomes
• McFarland, Groothuis, and Guignet (open access) find that NCAA football win percentage does not significantly change the number of students who apply to a college, except in the smaller “Group‐of‐Five” conferences, where win percentage is associated with an increase in the number of applications
• Weinbach et al. (open access) find that greater market concentration of the top four artists in the Billboard Hot 100 between 1952 and 1989 is associated with longer #1 songs and shorter songs in the #2 through #10 spots on the Billboard charts, but that there is little evidence of changes in song construction that might indicate a form of 'selling‐out'
• Dreber, Johannesson, and Yang (open access) find that there has been significant underreporting of placebo tests in eleven top economics journals between 2009 and 2021 (an indicator of p-hacking behaviour)
• Rabie, Rashwan, and Miniesy (open access) find that exerting effort while fasting reduces honesty, using a sample of employees and students at an Egyptian university, before and after Ramadan
• Cardazzi et al. find that that unexpected NBA losses lead to increases in domestic violence, using data from 2012 to 2018

This week in research #28

The blog's been quiet this week as I have been travelling. However, research marches on. Here's what caught my eye in research over the past week:

• Fernholz and Kramer (with ungated earlier version here) find that city population distributions for White populations in the US follow Zipf's and Gibrat's Laws from 1910 to 2020, but that Black populations only do so from the second half of the 20th Century, consistent with restricted mobility out of the South for Black populations
• Bian and Zhou find that industrial robot adoption has a significant negative effect on the internal migration inflows at the city level in China, while having little effect on internal migration outflows
• Bryson et al. (open access) find that there is little effect of head coach turnover on football (soccer) team performance, using data from the professional leagues in France, Germany, Italy, and Spain from 2000/01-2014/15

Book review: Campus Economics

Unsurprisingly, I have a strong view that everyone would be better off understanding and applying a little more economic thinking in their everyday lives, and their business and policy decision-making. In particular, recognising that there are trade-offs in every decision (TANSTAAFL - there ain't no such thing as a free lunch) would go a long way to improving the decisions that many people make. So, I had high hopes in reading Sandy Baum and Michael McPherson's book Campus Economics, which is subtitled "How economic thinking can help improve college and university decisions". And Baum and McPherson are explicit that their goal in the book is to:

...facilitate communication among groups on campus by creating a common vocabulary and encouraging modes of thinking that allow participants to better see other viewpoints and grapple with the trade-offs involved in making sound decisions.

Unfortunately, my high hopes for this book would go mostly unfulfilled. Much of the book is devoted to a descriptive presentation of data on college and universities, with a particular focus on enrolment and financial data. That sort of data has its place, and is interesting in some ways. However, the book didn't add a whole lot of value beyond the data, other than posing some questions to consider in various decision-making situations, including decisions related to faculty compensation, budget cuts, tuition pricing, college endowments. Now, the tertiary education sector in the US is quite diverse, with public, private not-for-profit, and private for-profit institutions, all with different goals and constraints, but nevertheless there are common elements to all of them and Baum and McPherson don't go very deep on any of these areas of decision-making. What we are left with is a once-over-lightly approach to a number of topics, which isn't very satisfying.

The book does have some positive aspects. For those unfamiliar with the US tertiary education context, it does provide a good primer, and may be useful for that purpose. Baum and McPherson present economic concepts close to the beginning of the book, but mostly avoid using the technical terms (like opportunity cost) thereafter, but I feel like the book would have been better if the technical terms (occasionally reminding readers of their meaning) had made more frequent appearances. In discussing college endowments, Baum and McPherson did point out one thing that many people should have a better understanding of, which is fungibility:

However, if the business curriculum is funded partly from the endowment gift and partly from general university funds, there is nothing to stop the university from reducing the general funds going to business and directing that money to hiring faculty in the arts. Because very few activities at universities are fully funded by endowment gifts, even restricted endowments are more "fungible" than they look.

Indeed, there are many occasions where funds that are earmarked for one purpose may nevertheless lead to no additional spending on that purpose, and we should always be conscious of that possibility.

Overall, despite those positive aspects, the people who would get the most out of this book are those who are interested in campus finances in higher education in the US. However, even then, the data are likely to get dated reasonably fast, even if the underlying concepts remain relevant. Beyond that, I don't think that the book provides enough depth to sustain a wider readership.

This week in research #27

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

• Whitelaw and Branson (open access) estimate the effects of pandemic-related closures on the academic performance trajectories of undergraduate students at a university in South Africa, and find performance gains in 2020, that were reversed in 2021, and that the achievement gap between students from differing socio-economic backgrounds increased
• Similarly, Su et al. (open access) look at the impact of zero-COVID policies on the academic performance of primary and secondary students in China, and find that the stringency of the zero-COVID policy is associated with significantly better mathematics performance for boys, while having no effects on girls
• Schläpfer finds that football (soccer) players from a cultural background that places a higher value on revenge are more likely to retaliate for a foul during a game but are not more likely to commit fouls overall, using data from nine football leagues over the period from 2016 to 2019
• Jeong and Lee (open access) introduce a spatial autoregressive hurdle model for nonnegative origin-destination flows (pretty technical, but interesting to those of us who may want to create econometric models or migration or trade flows that take into account spatial spillovers
• Niki (open access) uses TIMSS data from Japan to show that a reduction in instruction time due to the revision of curriculum guidelines in Japan reduced student test scores and motivation (no surprises there?)
• Anand and Kahn (with ungated earlier version here) find that teenage girls who observe a friend or older sibling’s teen pregnancy are less likely to have unprotected sex and have fewer sexual partners in the year following the end of the teen pregnancy
• Celhay, Depetris-Chauvin, and Riquelme (with ungated earlier version here) find that the 2011 nationwide student strike in Chile led to an average increase of 2.7% in teenage pregnancies (I guess students found something to do in their spare time during the strike?)