Free Expression,Pre‐Crime and Counter‐Terrorism Legislation

This article examines the Counter‐Terrorism and Border Security Act 2019 and how this new piece of legislation undermines fundamental human rights, including those protected in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). It considers in particular how the new act criminalises behaviour with a wide sweep, to include behaviour that is not in itself criminal, but might be indicative of future criminal intent. As a result, the act restricts the right to freedom of speech and to liberty in a manner that is neither necessary nor proportionate.     

Housing Voucher Take‐Up and Labor Market Impacts

Low participation rates in government assistance programs are a major policy concern in the United States. This paper studies take‐up of Section 8 housing vouchers, a program in which take‐up rates are quite low among interested and eligible households. We link 18,109 households in Chicago that were offered vouchers through a lottery to administrative data and study how baseline employment, earnings, public assistance, arrests, residential location, and children's academic performance predict take‐up. Our analysis finds mixed evidence of whether the most disadvantaged or distressed households face the largest barriers to program participation. We also study the causal impact of peer behavior on take‐up by exploiting idiosyncratic variation in the timing of voucher offers. We find that the probability of lease‐up increases with the number of neighbors who recently received voucher offers. Finally, we explore the policy implications of increasing housing voucher take‐up by applying reweighting methods to existing causal impact estimates of voucher receipt. This analysis suggests that greater utilization of vouchers may lead to larger reductions in labor market activity. Differences in take‐up rates across settings may be important to consider when assessing the external validity of studies identifying the effects of public assistance programs.     

Fiscal Slack and Counter‐Cyclical Expenditure Stabilization: A First Look at the Local Level

There is a rich literature on how state governments use slack fiscal resources—most often in the form of rainy day funds and budget stabilization funds—to minimize the effect of economic downturns. This paper presents the first known examination of whether slack resources have the same counter‐cyclical effects at the local level. It uses a panel data set to determine whether one particular form of local fiscal slack, general fund balance, stabilizes current annual expenditures among a sample of 103 Minnesota cities from 1990 to 2000. The findings suggest different fund balance portions have marginal but nonetheless important effects on expenditures.     

Signaling and Counter‐Signaling in the Judicial Hierarchy: An Empirical Analysis of En Banc Review

We leverage the institutional features of American courts to evaluate the importance of whistleblowers in hierarchical oversight. Drawing on a formal theory of signaling in the judicial hierarchy, we examine the role of whistleblowing dissents in triggering en banc review of three‐judge panels by full circuits of the Courts of Appeals. The theory generates predictions about how dissent interacts with judicial preferences to influence circuits' review and reversal decisions, which we test using original and existing data. First, we show that judges who dissent counter to their preferences are more likely to see their dissents lead to review and reversal. Second, we show that dissents are most influential when the likelihood of non‐compliance by a three‐judge panel is highest. Our results underscore the importance of dissent in the judicial hierarchy and illustrate how judicial whistleblowers can help appellate courts target the most important cases for review.     

Low‐Income Housing Development,Poverty Concentration,and Neighborhood Inequality

Considerable debate exists about the merits of place‐based programs that steer new development, and particularly affordable housing development, into low‐income neighborhoods. Exploiting quasi‐experimental variation in incentives to construct and rehabilitate rental housing across neighborhoods generated by Low‐Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) program rules, we explore the impacts of subsidized development on local housing construction, poverty concentration, and neighborhood inequality. While a large fraction of rental housing development spurred by the program is offset by a reduction in the number of new unsubsidized units, housing investment under the LIHTC has measurable effects on the distribution of income within and across communities. However, there is little evidence the program contributes meaningfully to poverty concentration or residential segregation.     

Party Management of Talent: Building a Party‐led,Merit‐based Talent Market in China

This study examines major policy measures that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leaders have adopted to establish a party‐led, merit‐based talent management system to cope with a talent deficit in the reform era. It also assesses the effectiveness of these measures at both national and local levels. This study argues that although merit principles are never entirely missing from China's cadre personnel management, they have been given increasing priority in managing the cadre corps and recruiting global experts to China during the past three decades. This study shows that the CCP personnel management policies are in substantial and adaptive evolution, which is important for understanding the nature of human resource management in post‐Mao China.     

Whole‐of‐Government Approaches to Outsourcing and Market Testing by the Commonwealth Government

This article traces the development of approaches to outsourcing by successive Australian governments from 1995. The analysis focuses on strategies initially adopted for the outsourcing of government information technology (IT) services and, subsequently, includes the market testing approach adopted for the outsourcing of both IT and corporate services. The framework for analysis has been based on theories of privatisation developed by Feigenbaum, Henig and Hamnett (1999). This framework offers insights into the goals and strategies employed by commonwealth government that underpin their approaches to sourcing of services for their public sector. The article concludes by discussing some of the unresolved issues associated with the failure of government to formally evaluate the impact of their outsourcing policies.     

The Propaganda of the Deed: Terrorism, Counterterrorism, and Mobilization

Many terrorist factions care about the level of popular support they enjoy within a population they claim to represent. Empirically, this level of support can either rise or fall in the aftermath of a campaign of terrorist violence. Under what circumstances is the use of terror an effective tactic for mobilizing political support for an extremist group? This article models a scenario in which an extremist faction considers attacking a government in the hopes of provoking a counterterror response that will radicalize the population, increasing the extremists' support at the expense of a more moderate faction. In our scenario, such radicalization can result either from the economic damage caused by counterterror operations or by the way in which such operations change the population's assessment of the government's motivations. We demonstrate that such attempts at mobilizing public support can be, but need not be, successful, discuss factors that make both the initiation of a terror campaign and successful mobilization more or less likely, and relate our results to several empirical cases.     

An Effective Approach to the Repeated Cross‐Sectional Design

Repeated cross‐sectional (RCS) designs are distinguishable from true panels and pooled cross‐sectional time series (PCSTS) since cross‐sectional units (e.g., individual survey respondents) appear but once in the data. This poses two serious challenges. First, as with PCSTS, autocorrelation threatens inferences. However, common solutions like differencing and using a lagged dependent variable are not possible with RCS since lags for i cannot be used. Second, although RCS designs contain information that allows both aggregate‐ and individual‐level analyses, available methods—from pooled ordinary least squares to PCSTS to time series—force researchers to choose one level of analysis. The PCSTS tool kit does not provide an appropriate solution, and we offer one here: double filtering with ARFIMA methods to account for autocorrelation in longer RCS followed by the use of multilevel modeling to estimate both aggregate‐ and individual‐level parameters simultaneously. We use Monte Carlo experiments and three applied examples to explore the advantages of our framework.     

Terrorism,Intelligence and Law Enforcement: Learning the Right Lessons

More than a generation ago, in the wake of investigations by the US Congress into improprieties carried out by US intelligence agencies, the United States, in effect, raised the wall between intelligence and law enforcement in order to protect the liberties of Americans. For similar reasons, its Cold War institutions enshrined distinctions between foreign and domestic, and public and private. The CIA was and is, for instance, enjoined from law enforcement and domestic activity.

Those distinctions served the country tolerably well during the Cold War but set it up to fail on September 11. Now, a rethinking of them is underway, as the balance between security and liberty is re-struck. It is imperative, though, to learn the right lessons on September 11. That means thinking carefully and proceeding slowly as changes are made. It also means carefully evaluating the effects of proposed changes, especially to avoid ‘pain for no gain’ measures that do inconvenience people, or even affect their liberties, for little or no gain in the war on terrorism.