As you may have seen, I’ve spent this week skimming job market papers. Instead of the usual links, then, here are some interesting job market papers not on migration.
My favorite intern,1 Helen Kissel, has a very cool JMP on variation in C-section rates: “C-section rates differ up to 10-fold across hospitals, with substantial variation even for clinically similar patients… This variation in practice style has meaningful consequences for patient health: low-risk patients quasi-randomly assigned to more C-section-intensive physicians are 10% more likely to deliver via unplanned C-section, leading to worse maternal health outcomes without measurable improvements in infant health.”
In many rich countries, households invest in stocks or similar productive assets. In India, households tend to invest in gold. Soroush Sabet (Tilburg) and Jonas Gathen (LSE) find that welfare would be 13% higher in India if this idle gold were productively invested.
Avenia Ghazarian (Stockholm School of Economics) presents a fascinating empirical study on collective events that reveal hidden preferences. After protests about veiling in Iran, compliance with the mandatory hijab law dropped substantially, and women gained more resources in household bargaining.
According to Alexander Fertig (Michigan) and Megan Ryan, internet access was used to facilitate protests in Myanmar, so reducing internet access reduced protests. However, as the internet became more censored, this effect disappeared.2
Does humanitarian aid work as soft power? Yep. Miguel Fajardo-Steinhäuser (LSE) also finds that humanitarian aid increases support for the country’s own government, because access to aid is perceived as evidence that domestic institutions are improving.
Why do people use traditional medicine in India? According to Zincy Wei (Northwestern), they trust India’s traditional medicine authority. If they believe this authority endorses the use of modern medicine, they increase spending on modern medicines.
Carmela Accettura (Universidad Carlos III de Madrid) finds that female resistance leaders in WWII Italy increased acceptance of female leaders after the war. Areas with more female resistance leaders continue to have more female candidates for political office and show stronger support for women’s rights.
According to Youn Baek (NYU Stern), exposure to missionaries (within the US) drove support for development aid.
The draft of this paper isn’t up yet, but Francesca Meli (University of Padova) finds that students with early chronotypes have higher high school GPAs. As the possessor of a late chronotype, I am both aware and resentful of this fact.
OK, so she’s my only intern to date, but she’s great.
Someday, I may revive a meta-analysis looking at how different types of communication media are used by protestors and regimes. Are there systematic patterns in the types of ICT that advantage protesters vs. the regime? I argue there are.