Roses Are Redder…

The originally Western day for lovers is catching on among enamoured white collars in China. THEY sit there staring into the depths of one another's souls. Pulses quicken as the waiter slips the meticulously prepared Valentine's special onto the candle-lit table. Fingers interlock, and the rapt lovers are unable to tell whether the dizziness is caused by the romance, or the revolving restaurant in which they're dining. Their gaze breaks for a peek outside the window, down upon the shimmering city lights. Only the perpetual pollution kissing the outside of the windowpane betrays that they sit in west Beijing's CCTV tower, and not in Paris... Now that might read like something out of a Mills and Boon novel (or their Chinese counterpart, Chiung Yao), but scenes like that are everywhere in China's wealthier cities on February 14. Along with Christmas and Halloween, Valentine's Day is jostling to become the country's most celebrated Western festival. It's having some success, too.     

THE FAMILIAL TRANSMISSION OF CRIMINAL CONVICTIONS*

This article examines the familial transmission of criminal convictions in families in the Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development. Our main analyses focus on the 344 families in the Cambridge Study with two or more children. Criminal convictions were highly familial because convictions in a parent increased the risk of convictions in a child. Correlations between siblings were stronger in same-sex siblings (.45 to .50) than in opposite-sex ones (.27). Sibling correlations did not vary by birth order. Convictions of mothers and father correlated .55. Parent-child correlations were about the same as within-generation correlations between siblings. LISREL models were used to assess whether the effect of parental convictions on child convictions was direct or mediated through the quality of the family environment (i.e., supervision. child rearing, and family size). The best fitting LISREL models suggested a direct effect of parental convictions on child convictions, without any mediation by family environment. These data on fill biological siblings, however, did not permit separate estimation of family environmental versus genetic effects. One environmental effect appeared, however—a socialization effect among siblings; in families with three sons, there appeared to be mutual influence of one sibling on another. Also, regression models based on the boys suggested that family environmental variables did add to parental criminality.     

Regulation as the Mother of Innovation: The Case of SO2 Control*

This paper explores the relationship between government actions and innovation in an environmental control technology—sulfur dioxide (SO₂) control technologies for power plants—through the use of complementary research methods. Its findings include the importance of regulation and the anticipation of regulation in stimulating invention; the greater role of regulation, as opposed to public R&D expenditures, in inducing invention; the importance of regulatory stringency in determining technical pathways and stimulating collaboration; and the importance of regulatory‐driven technological diffusion in contributing to operating experience and post‐adoption innovation in cost and performance. A number of policy implications are drawn from this work.     

MINORITY THREAT AND POLICE STRENGTH FROM 1980 TO 2000: A FIXED‐EFFECTS ANALYSIS OF NONLINEAR AND INTERACTIVE EFFECTS IN LARGE U.S. CITIES*

Many studies have assessed threat theory by investigating the relationships between the size of minority populations and police strength. Yet these investigations analyzed older data with cross‐sectional designs. This study uses a fixed‐effects panel design to detect nonlinear and interactive relationships between minority presence and the per capita number of police in large U.S. cities in the last three census years. The findings show that the relationship between racial threat and the population‐corrected number of police officers has recently become considerably stronger. In accord with theoretically based expectations, tests for interactions show that segregated cities with larger African American populations have smaller departments. The coefficients on another interaction effect suggest that racial segregation leads to reductions in police strength in the South perhaps because officers are less likely to intervene in residentially isolated black neighborhoods in this region.     

THE BIG,BAD WORLD

More Chinese college students dive into the big, bad world every June - this year, there are more than 4 million. What's involved in bridging the gap between campus and working life?