Round-up: Polygenic scores and the Wilson effect

The most interesting articles that came to our attention this week

The Collapse of Teen Fertility in the Digital Era. Nathan Hudson and Hernan Boedo argue that the rise of smartphones and social media accounts for the worldwide fall in teen fertility beginning in 2007. Analysing data from the US, they find that areas with worse 4G coverage, owing to their terrain, saw smaller falls in teen fertility after 2007. They also use time diary data to show that in-person socialising collapsed over the same period.

The Effects of School Phone Bans: National Evidence from Lockable Pouches. Hunt Allcott and colleagues examine the impact of lockable phone pouches in US schools. Tracking schools before and after they adopted pouches, and comparing them to schools that did not adopt pouches during the relevant period, they find that adoption leads to higher student well-being (albeit with a lag) but has no discernible effect on test scores.