Do public protests have any effect?

The most interesting articles that came to our attention this week

Essay content and style are strongly related to household income and SAT scores: Evidence from 60,000 undergraduate applications. A. J. Alvero and colleagues examine how the content of admissions essays relates to household income and SAT scores. Analysing 240,000 essays submitted by applicants to the University of California in 2016, they find that essay content is more strongly related to household income than are SAT scores.

Father absence and the welfare of children. In a classic article from 1999, Sara McLanahan examines how father absence impacts children’s outcomes. She notes that the risk of dropping out of high school for children whose fathers died is much closer to the risk for children from intact families than for children whose parents divorced. This suggests that father absence itself does not lead to worse outcomes for children.

Predictors of Engaging in Interracial Dating. Sebastian Jensen and Emil Kirkegaard examine predictors of interracial dating in the US. They find that whites who engage in interracial dating have lower average IQs, while blacks and Hispanics who do so have higher average IQs. The same is true of several other traits, including SES, honesty and height (for Hispanics). This indicates that interracial dating is assortative.

Among blacks and Hispanics, IQ is positively associated with interracial dating; among whites, the opposite is true.