Today at church, we sang a bunch of Christmas songs. Unprompted, afterwards, the 3.5-year-old said... "I like singing. It makes me want to cry and eat stuff."

I’m old enough to remember when one of you all said “I think we’ve learned all that we can from audit studies” a few years ago.

Clear evidence that at universities conservatives don't face higher obstacles than liberals to establish student groups + invite outside speakers. "These results fail to offer support for the view that conservative students encounter more difficulty in efforts to access campus resources."

hellscape

Newly released evidence from Portugal shows that taking exams on a computer reduces kids' scores A LOT. Old fashioned paper and pencil exams FTW!

Cool new tool to check if your references contain retraction risks. www.retractionrisk.com

People are willing to forgo a significant portion of their earnings—between 12-36% of their wages—to avoid hostile work environments. Women exhibit a stronger aversion to exclusionary workplaces and environments with sexual harassment.

Employees who use AI at work are viewed as... -lazier, -less competent, -less diligent, -less independent, and -less self-assured.

Woah. Argentina's 1990s preschool expansion program appears to have been a smashing success. The program increased high school completion by a whole 11.9 percentage points. The authors estimate that for every $1 spent, the preschool expansion generated about $11 in benefits.

This looks like a must-read for diff-in-diffs folks. www.nber.org/papers/w34550

Barring federal funding for abortion ↑ the number of births to non-white women under 29. This ↑ welfare participation in states w larger abortion funding declines. This extended into the next generation. "Abortion funding restrictions reinforce long-run economic inequality across generations."

New evidence that short-term rentals--like those on Airbnb--increase neighborhood rodent infestations, traffic collisions, and crime.

I was also bored and pulled up the replication package. The results are quite sensitive in aggregate to needing the controls. Here's the replication of Figure 3, including the case w/o controls:

Why aren't families having more babies? This brand new paper argues that part of the reason is because childcare is so expensive. "A 10% increase in the price of childcare leads to a 5.7% decrease in the birth rate" abigaildow.com/assets/docs/...

Kudos to @chanret.bsky.social for downloading the replication data on this paper. This work is so important. As I suspected, the key result looks pretty flimsy.

Damning overview of the nudging literature. "[We] provide the most comprehensive synthesis of the effectiveness of nudging." "We find a small aggregated effect size." "[Our results show] the urgent need for higher quality, preregistered meta-analyses to clarify the true impact [of nudging]."

I guess, in a weird way, this typo--it should be "DECREASED a NIMBYism index"--provides some evidence that I'm not using AI to write my posts. I'm very human! Mistakes are human validation checks! :)

Um, ok... This paper forthcoming at the JOP provides evidence that rent control in Germany actually made tenants MASSIVELY *less* NIMBY. This result was in the opposite direction of the authors' pre-registered expectations. And the effect sizes are, truly, massive.

I just learned, in a very public setting, that I've been saying a proverbial phrase incorrectly my whole life. The saying: “Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you'll land among the stars.” What I've been saying: “Shoot for the stars. Even if you miss, you'll land on the moon.” I'm shook.

More evidence that UBI may not influence crime.* "Changes in criminal activity from [Alaska's Permanent Fund Dividend payments] are small." *This one is for all of the rascals who yelled at me about the null effect of UBI on crime being from Finland.

See also Watson, Guettabi, Reimer (2020), "Universal Cash and Crime" in ReStat.

Ahem. Political science is the *best* science. In all seriousness: Political scientists use the scientific method. And it's not like the political world is mystical/made-up. Assuming a closed physical universe, human behavior has some explanation - it's just hard to identify.* *In all senses

my totally unsolicited end-of-the-semester advice to junior scholars is to keep the nice notes that students write to you in a safe place so you can reference them when things get tough in the future.

A plea to reviewers: If you are going to recommend rejecting a manuscript after 3+ rounds of revisions, can you at least do so in a timely manner?

My number of peer reviews completed each year.* Things are getting out a bit unwieldy.** *I got fewer invitations in 2022/2023. I don't know why. **I do say no to some review requests. Probably not enough. I don't track those.

Conservatives' confidence in the scientific community continues to crater.

Do you think giving folks a basic income would reduce crime? Think again. "We estimate precise zero effects [of basic income] on criminal perpetration."

Noise pollution from electric passenger rail harms babies' health. "I estimate that the annual cost of noise pollution due to harms to health at birth is $9.8 billion." Black, Hispanic, and the poorest Americans disproportionately bear these costs. This is such a cool paper!

When firms unionize it makes their workers become even more liberal.

We should probably be placing incarcerated people in prisons closest to their homes. Why? Assigning individuals to prisons closer to their home reduces recidivism. Really? Yep. Being placed close to one's home increases social contacts that appear to reduce reoffending.

Poor folks have (comparatively) few rich friends on Facebook.

A word of wisdom from @cdsamii.bsky.social re credibility revolution and survey experiments: your conjoint or list experiment is not a policy intervention with real causal effects -- it's a measurement tool. A lot of smart folks are still confused about it for some reason! cyrussamii.com?p=4168

Go home prediction markets: you’re drunk Political prediction markets moved billions in 2024, but new evidence shows they weren’t very accurate or efficient PredictIt beat chance 93% of the time Kalshi? 78% Polymarket? 67% Big price divergences, weak/negative correlations, & rampant arbitrage

I ❤️ cool metascience.

Living near a gambling establishment increases the likelihood of people becoming problematic gamblers.

"The Credibility Revolution in Political Science" osf.io/preprints/so...

"[Political science] studies without an explicit identification strategy...constitute nearly 40% of empirical quantitative work."

"Broad claims of generalized cognitive enhancement resulting from physical exercise appear premature"

You lose your wallet. Where are you most likely to get it back? It depends on how much $$$ is in the wallet. But it's better to lose your wallet in: Switzerland 🇨🇭 Norway 🇳🇴 Netherlands 🇳🇱 Denmark 🇩🇰 You're far less likely to get your wallet back in: China 🇨🇳 Morrocco 🇲🇦 Peru 🇵🇪 Kazakhstan 🇰🇿

Exposure to the Dave Ramsey Show decreases monthly household expenditures.

There’s something deeply bizarre about mass-litigating an individual student’s grades.

Legalizing recreational marijuana reduces suicides among older white Americans.

WIC reduces birth weight disparities between black and white babies. www.nber.org/papers/w34521

Name assimilation increases immigrants' earnings A LOT. osf.io/preprints/so...

You know what pairs perfectly with Thanksgiving turkey, mashed potatoes, and pie? ... ... ... Finishing that review you've been sitting on for 6+ months.

Wild how the average age of Nobel winners keeps rising

Does blinding--i.e., concealing applicants' identities--reduce gender gaps in academic conference paper acceptances? Nope! Does blinding do anything? It does! Blinding reduces gaps in acceptances by institution rank. haruka-uchida.github.io/websitefiles...

I recently hit 6 months under review for a paper. The reviewers must really like them to spend so much time on them.