The first result for "program language comparison", at least when I view https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=programming+language+co... is: Prechelt, Lutz. "An empirical comparison of seven programming languages." Computer 33.10 (2000): 23-29.
There's all sorts of work which cite that paper, like "An empirical investigation of the effects of type systems and code completion on api usability using typescript and javascript in ms visual studio".
For fun, here are some of those citation which themselves use the phrase "An empirical study" or similar in the title:
"An empirical study on the impact of static typing on software maintainability"
"An empirical study of the influence of static type systems on the usability of undocumented software"
"Do developers benefit from generic types? An empirical comparison of generic and raw types in Java"
"An empirical study on C++ concurrency constructs"
"An empirical study on the factors affecting software development productivity"
"An empirical study to revisit productivity across different programming languages"
I recall a study being quoted in my university courses, which described the amount of code needed to get certain things done between different languages, which showed that Python, Ruby and others are on the less verbose side, the reasoning being that on average they'd also be more productive.
This seems to coincide with my personal experience, where JavaScript with React was much easier to work with in smaller projects, whereas using TypeScript with React lead to much slower development because of all the typing that needed to be handled, especially in cases of union types. Now, one can say that it's worth the effort to be more confident in your code doing what you want it to both now and after X months, much like you could sometimes prefer the type systems of Java or .NET over Python, Ruby or PHP, but in my eyes those tradeoffs always come with slower development velocity.
The sad thing, however, is that DuckDuckGo (and possibly other search engines) failed to return the original study or anything like it, only resulting in low quality blog content:
Anyone have any better search queries for this? Any idea why the search result quality is generally so low? Any ideas which study it might have been referencing?