The ‘Butner Study’ Redux: A Report of the Incidence of Hands-on Child Victimization by Child Pornography Offenders

This study compared two groups of child pornography offenders participating in a voluntary treatment program: men whose known sexual offense history at the time of judicial sentencing involved the possession, receipt, or distribution of child abuse images, but did not include any “hands-on” sexual abuse; and men convicted of similar offenses who had documented histories of hands-on sexual offending against at least one child victim. The goal was to determine whether the former group of offenders were “merely” collectors of child pornography at little risk for engaging in hands-on sexual offenses, or if they were contact sex offenders whose criminal sexual behavior involving children, with the exception of Internet crimes, went undetected. Our findings show that the Internet offenders in our sample were significantly more likely than not to have sexually abused a child via a hands-on act. They also indicate that the offenders who abused children were likely to have offended against multiple victims, and that the incidence of “crossover” by gender and age is high.

Party Animals? Extreme Partisan Polarization and Dehumanization

Political Behavior - The affective, identity based, and often negative nature of partisan polarization in the United States has been a subject of much scholarly attention. Applying insights from...     

The impact of real estate agents on house prices near environmental disamenities

The purpose of this paper is to determine the impact of real estate agents on the price of houses that are located close to an environmental disamenity. Our main hypothesis is that real estate agents obtain higher prices than those theoretically expected when the houses are located closer to an environmental disamenity. We attribute this result to agents' ability to effectively match potential buyers to house sellers as well as their influence on bargaining power. Estimates from a sample selection corrected hedonic model suggest that the percentage increase in the house price obtained by a real estate agent is greater than the commission rate.