476. The Øresund bridge between Denmark and Sweden increased the gender wage gap in the region (Bütikofer et al. 2022) 477. Gorbachev’s policies of perestroika (restructuring) and glasnost (official openness) led to the collapse of the Soviet regime (Kramer 2022) 478. Marriage inequality increased civil conflict in the Boko Haram insurgency (Rexer 2022) 479. In […]
Category: science
Experiments and societal challenges
The randomised controlled trial is seen as the gold standard within the social sciences. I do not disagree. I love well-executed experiments with strong causal identification. If two studies, one experimental and one non-experimental, differ in their conclusions, there is no doubt which study I, all else equal, will side with. Most importantly, I often […]
25 interesting facts #19
451. In art auction markets, blue and red paintings generate higher bids (Ma et al. 2022) 452. Increasing group size reduces perceptions of danger (Tedeschi et al. 2021) 453. In 2019, only 54% of Americans agree that human beings developed from earlier species of animals (Miller et al. 2021) 454. Before numerical or written marks […]
#PleaseDontStealMyWork
Universitetsverdenen er et besynderligt sted at være. Der er begrænsede resourcer og få midler, hvorfor akademikere socialiseres til at gå ekstra meget op i status (herunder at fokusere på at publicere i bestemte tidsskrifter, forlag osv.). En væsentlig del af akademikeres arbejde er at få gode idéer, der kan publiceres i anerkendte tidsskrifter. Desværre har […]
25 interesting facts #18
426. Western sanctions on Russia in 2014 forced Putin to pay a political price, but the price was low compared to the benefits arising from the Crimea annexation (Alexseev and Hale 2020) 427. More than three-quarters of the Amazon rainforest has been losing resilience since the early 2000s (Boulton et al. 2022) 428. Men are […]
Open and Reproducible Research Glossary
The Framework for Open and Reproducible Research Training have launched a new glossary. You can find a paywalled paper introducing the glossary here. I did not find the glossary easy to skim through so I decided to download the glossary from GitHub and make my own table with the 261 entries. Here it is: Title […]
How effective is nudging? #2
In a new study, Mertens et al. (2022) examine the effectiveness of nudging. Specifically, they conduct a meta-analysis of 455 effect sizes from 214 publications. Here is the key finding presented in the abstract: “Our results show that choice architecture interventions overall promote behavior change with a small to medium effect size of Cohen’s d […]
25 interesting facts #17
401. The highest emitting 100 urban areas account for 18% of the global carbon footprint (Moran et al. 2018) 402. In the United States, indigenous land density has been reduced by nearly 99% (Farrell et al. 2022) 403. Researchers funded by the alcohol industry are more likely to report alcohol protective effects (Golder and McCambridge […]
Book Review: Stop Reading the News
I do not read a lot of news in a traditional sense. I do not open up the daily newspaper. I rely on my curated Twitter feed and several blogs to keep myself posted on what goes on, up and down in the world. For that reason, I might not be the target audience for […]
New article in British Journal of Political Science: Dynamic Political Interest
In the new issue of British Journal of Political Science, you will find an article by me. Here is the abstract: In order to explain differences in political interest, two strands of literature point to the relevance of either dispositional or situational factors. I remedy this and show how political interest is shaped by the […]