Is Gun Violence Contagious? A Spatiotemporal Test

Objectives

Existing theories of gun violence predict stable spatial concentrations and contagious diffusion of gun violence into surrounding areas. Recent empirical studies have reported confirmatory evidence of such spatiotemporal diffusion of gun violence. However, existing space/time interaction tests cannot readily distinguish spatiotemporal clustering from spatiotemporal diffusion. This leaves as an open question whether gun violence actually is contagious or merely clusters in space and time. Compounding this problem, gun violence is subject to considerable measurement error with many nonfatal shootings going unreported to police.

Methods

Using point process data from an acoustical gunshot locator system and a combination of Bayesian spatiotemporal point process modeling and classical space/time interaction tests, this paper distinguishes between clustered but non-diffusing gun violence and clustered gun violence resulting from diffusion.

Results

This paper demonstrates that contemporary urban gun violence in a metropolitan city does diffuse in space and time, but only slightly.

Conclusions

These results suggest that a disease model for the spread of gun violence in space and time may not be a good fit for most of the geographically stable and temporally stochastic process observed. And that existing space/time tests may not be adequate tests for spatiotemporal gun violence diffusion models.

     

ASEAN and transboundary haze pollution in Southeast Asia

In recent decades the countries of Southeast Asia have been affected by air pollution (commonly called haze) arising from the burning of vegetation by small holders, plantation owners and logging companies. This is done in order to clear or rejuvenate the land for cultivation and planting and can occur at particular times during the year, most noticeably in the periods March to May and August to October. The burning has resulted in widespread forest fires and has been particularly intense in years when the weather has been noticeably dry due to the effects of the El Nino phenomenon. By far the main source of forest fires caused by small holders and plantation owners has been Indonesia. The smoke from the forest fires has not only caused widespread air pollution in Indonesia itself but also in neighbouring countries, resulting in what is termed as transboundary air pollution. This has affected, amongst other things, public health, bio-diversity, tourism, air transport, and agricultural production. So serious have the effects been that the member states of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) were prompted from 1990 to collaborate in tackling the problem and to embark upon a series of joint initiatives for that purpose. After discussing the extent of forest burning in Indonesia, its causes and effects, the article will examine and assess the initiatives mentioned above, culminating in the ASEAN Agreement on Transboundary Haze Pollution, which came into effect in November 2003. The paper will then examine a crucial impediment to the effective implementation of the initiatives: viz. the standards of governance and administration in Indonesia. In conclusion, the paper will consider the challenges to be overcome to enable the aims of the ASEAN initiatives to be realised, and also, by examining these initiatives, what conditions are necessary to ensure that international agreements affecting domestic policy and administration in signatory states, have a genuine impact and achieve their goals.This article is an updated and amended version of an earlier article by the author entitled ‘ASEAN Initiatives to Combat Haze Pollution: An Assessment of Regional Cooperation in Public Policy-Making’, Asian Journal of Political Science, vol. 12, no.2 (December 2004):59–77.

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The disparate labor market impacts of monetary policy

Employing two widely used approaches to identify the effects of monetary policy, this paper explores the differential impact of policy on the labor market outcomes of teenagers, minorities, out‐of‐school youth, and less‐skilled individuals. Evidence from recursive vector autoregressions and autoregressive distributed lag models that use information on the Federal Reserve's contractionary initiatives indicate that the employment‐population ratio of minorities is more sensitive to contractionary monetary policy than that of whites. The ratio falls primarily because of an increase in unemployment and not because of a decline in labor force participation. Monetary policy appears to have a disproportionate effect on the unemployment rate of teenagers, particularly African American teenagers. Their employment‐population ratios fall because of increased difficulty in obtaining employment. The larger responses are not caused by their higher likelihood of having been employed in industries and occupations that are more sensitive to contractionary monetary policy. © 2004 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

The Ground Game in the 2012 Presidential Election

Relatively little research has examined the effects of campaign-led field activity in a competitive election. In this article, we leverage a unique data set containing the location of every Barack Obama and Mitt Romney field office and county-level data on the presidential vote to understand how communication with voters in the field may have affected the outcome of the 2012 presidential election. We find that the presence of Obama field offices was associated with greater Obama vote share at the county level, although we cannot detect a similar relationship for Romney field offices. We conduct additional robustness tests to address the potential limitations of these observational data. Ultimately, we conclude that even if Obama’s field organization out-performed Romney’s, the aggregate impact of Obama’s field organization was not large enough to determine the outcome of the 2012 presidential election.     

Governance Issues for Public Sector Boards

The push to apply corporate governance arrangements from the private sector into the public sector is a manifestation of the ongoing search for ways to improve accountability and performance. This small interview study reports on the experience of senior Commonwealth public servants and board directors trying to work within the corporate governance frameworks set out in the Commonwealth Authorities and Companies Act (1997) and the Financial Management and Accountability Act (1997). It suggests that lines of accountability can be blurred, formal authority can be subverted, and safeguards to protect the public interest, against harms such as political patronage, may be weak or absent. Many agencies do not have appropriate procedures for assessing their own governance arrangements. There is considerable resistance to the notion that a central authority should be established with the dedicated purpose of overseeing governance arrangements and practices in the Commonwealth.     

MOTHERING,FATHERING, AND DIVORCE: THE INFLUENCE OF DIVORCE ON REPORTS OF AND DESIRES FOR MATERNAL AND PATERNAL INVOLVEMENT*

The present study investigated the extent to which young adults' reports of—and desires for—maternal and paternal involvement differed between intact and divorced families. An ethnically diverse sample of 1,376 young adults completed measures of reported and desired mothering and fathering across 20 parenting domains. Results indicated that both reports of and desires for father involvement differed sharply by family form (intact versus divorced), whereas few family form differences emerged for reported or desired mother involvement. These findings are discussed in terms of implications for custody and access decisions within the family court system.