Thursday, July 13, 2023

Observations of a wild colony of macaques over three years show same-sex sexual behavior among males is widespread and may be beneficial

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Jackson Clive, Ewan Flintham, Vincent Savolainen. Same-sex sociosexual behaviour is widespread and heritable in male rhesus macaques. Nature...

Why military elites fight in civil wars and on what side: In addition to home state, economic and professional interests were a major influence on West Pointers

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Rebel, Remain, or Resign? Military Elites’ Decision-Making at the Onset of the American Civil War. Peter B. White. Journal of Conflict Resol...
Wednesday, July 12, 2023

We find that, as Asian students arrive, white student enrollment declines in higher-income suburbs; fears of academic competition may play a role

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White Flight from Asian Immigration: Evidence from California Public Schools. Leah Platt Boustan, Christine Cai & Tammy Tseng. NBER Work...

Traditional beliefs: Commonly-used, but typically prohibitively expensive rituals, partially correct the beliefs about the risk of theft for sellers who report believing in the ritual’s efficacy, which allows for more inventory and larger sales

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On the Importance of African Traditional Religion for Economic Behavior. Lewis Dunia Butinda, Aimable Amani Lameke, Nathan Nunn, Max Posch ...
Monday, July 10, 2023

Credit expansions to the non-tradable sector systematically predict growth slowdowns & financial crises; credit expansions to the tradable sector are associated with sustained output & productivity growth without a higher risk of a financial crisis

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Credit Allocation and Macroeconomic Fluctuations. Karsten Müller & Emil Verner. NBER Working Paper 31420, Jun 2023. DOI 10.3386/w31420 A...
Tuesday, July 4, 2023

In the case of the Aztec Empire, high inequality predates the Spanish–Aztec War; the richest 1% earned 41.8% of the total income, while the income share of the poorest 50% was just 23.3%

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Income and inequality in the Aztec Empire on the eve of the Spanish conquest. Guido Alfani & Alfonso Carballo. Nature Human Behaviour, J...
Monday, July 3, 2023

People prefer natural medicines more when treating psychological than physical conditions, because they perceive natural drugs to be less likely than synthetic drugs to alter their true selves

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Consumers prefer natural medicines more when treating psychological than physical conditions. Tianyi Li, David Gal. Journal of Consumer Psyc...

Self-reported pro-environmental behavior was highly exaggerated, especially by environmentalists

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Identifying bias in self-reported pro-environmental behavior. Katharina Koller, Paulina K. Pankowska, Cameron Brick. Current Research in Eco...

The contribution of work experience and education to human capital accumulation and economic development might be equally important

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Jedwab, Remi, Paul Romer, Asif M. Islam, and Roberto Samaniego. 2023. "Human Capital Accumulation at Work: Estimates for the World and ...
Sunday, July 2, 2023

Consistent with a plausible cultural mechanism, individuals whose origin place a high value on autonomy hold a comparative advantage in positions characterized by a low degree of routinization; this persists among immigrants' children

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Cultural Values and Productivity. Andreas Ek. Journal of Political Economy, Jun 2023. https://doi.org/10.1086/726239 Abstract: This paper es...
Monday, June 19, 2023

Minimum wage increases lead to increased point-in-time homeless population counts; further analysis suggests disemployment and rental housing prices, but not migration, as mechanisms

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Hill, Seth J. 2023. “Minimum Wages and Homelessness.” OSF Preprints. June 5. doi:10.31219/osf.io/z2fqj. Abstract: America's cities conti...
Thursday, June 15, 2023

Game Theory and the First World War

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Myerson, Roger B. 2023. "Game Theory and the First World War." Journal of Economic Literature, 61 (2): 716-35. DOI: 10.1257/jel.20...
Tuesday, May 30, 2023

Mineral and material commodities are essential inputs to economic production, but there have been periodical concerns about mineral scarcity

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Pretis, Felix and Hepburn, Cameron and Pfeiffer, Alexander and Teytelboym, Alexander, Are We Running Out of Exhaustible Resources? (May 24, ...
Saturday, May 27, 2023

Exposure to and engagement with partisan or unreliable news on Google Search are driven not primarily by algorithmic curation but by users’ own choices

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Users choose to engage with more partisan news than they are exposed to on Google Search. Ronald E. Robertson, Jon Green, Damian J. Ruck, Ka...
Monday, May 8, 2023

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion has low correlation with gender and ethnic diversity in the boardroom, in senior management, and within the workforce; DEI exhibits no link with future stock returns

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Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. Alex Edmans, Caroline Flammer & Simon Glossner. NBER Working Paper 31215. May 2023. DOI 10.3386/w31215...
Wednesday, May 3, 2023

Manager quality in retail is generally hard to explain with the observables in our data, but is correlated with the ratio of full-time to part-time workers

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Managers and Productivity in Retail. Robert D. Metcalfe, Alexandre B. Sollaci & Chad Syverson. NBER Working Paper 31192. April 2023. htt...
Sunday, April 30, 2023

In Defense of Merit in Science

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In Defense of Merit in Science. D. Abbot et al. Journal of Controversial Ideas, Apr 28 2023. https://journalofcontroversialideas.org/article...
Monday, April 17, 2023

Income raises human well-being indefinitely, but the impacts gradually become marginal with higher income; age consistently slashes well-being

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Income raises human well-being indefinitely, but age consistently slashes it. Chao Li & Shunsuke Managi. Scientific Reports volume 13, A...

Participants had better memory for tweets than news headlines

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Memory for tweets versus headlines: Does message consistency matter? Tori Peña, Raeya Maswood, Melissa Chen, Suparna Rajaram. Applied Cognit...
Sunday, April 16, 2023

Harbingers of failure do exist: Their positive (negative) pre-release movie reviews provide a strong predictive signal that the movie will turn out to be a flop (success)

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What reviews foretell about opening weekend box office revenue: the harbinger of failure effect in the movie industry. Pantelis Loupos, Yve...

The origin of pleasant sensations: insight from direct electrical brain stimulation

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The origin of pleasant sensations: insight from direct electrical brain stimulation. Cécile Villard et al. Cortex, April 13 2023. https://do...