Peer effects in affirmative action: Evidence from law student performance

In the Grutter case, Justice O’Connor suggested that universities could justifiably try to enroll a “critical mass” of minority students. Enroll fewer than that “critical mass,” reason some observers, and minority students will feel too marginalized to perform at their highest levels. In this article, we test whether minority students perform better with other students from their ethnic group in a class or school. To do so, we assemble data on the ethnicity and performance of each student in all classes at two law schools - for three years at one, and for 16 years at the other. Although these schools enrolled a smaller fraction of African-Americans than most law schools, they are located in states with a much smaller fraction of African-Americans than in the United States as a whole. There is also a large amount of variation in the percent African-American across classes. At these schools, we find no consistent evidence that having additional students from one's ethnic group raises a student's performance. Instead, we find some evidence that having additional ethnic peers lowers performance - albeit by a very small amount.     

Race,economy and punishment: inequity and racial disparity in imprisonment, 1972–2002

Guided by the Rusche and Kirchheimer thesis, this study examines variation in incarceration rates across states. Time-series regression analysis is applied to 30?years of state-level data to examine how economic factors interact with aggregate measures of race/ethnicity in predicting rates of incarceration. The analysis indicates that income inequality, not unemployment, is the most salient predictor of incarceration rates. That is, state-level measures of income inequality exert a strong, positive effect on state-level incarceration rates, and this effect is particularly salient in the presence of higher percentages of African-Americans.     

Regulating DAS Developments: Making Small Cells Work in a Macro World

Abstract

We are all familiar with the 120‐ to 200‐foot towers and monopoles with their triangular antenna arrays that have come to dot our landscape over the last 20 years. While these “macro” cell sites are not going away any time in the foreseeable future, new small cell deployments, known as DAS, or Distributed Antenna Systems, are increasingly being used by carriers and infrastructure providers to fill in coverage gaps and increase system capacity in congested areas. DAS equipment requires less power and can be located closer in proximity to its end users, often utilizing small form-factor antennas that can easily blend into their surroundings.