What a Difference a Grade Makes: Evidence from New York City's Restaurant Grading Policy

Can governments use grades to induce businesses to improve their compliance with regulations? Does public disclosure of compliance with food safety regulations matter for restaurants? Ultimately, this depends on whether grades matter for the bottom line. Based on 28 months of data on more than 15,000 restaurants in New York City, this article explores the impact of public restaurant grades on economic activity and public resources using rigorous panel data methods, including fixed‐effects models with controls for underlying food safety compliance. Results show that A grades reduce the probability of restaurant closure and increase revenues while increasing sales taxes remitted and decreasing fines relative to B grades. Conversely, C grades increase the probability of restaurant closure and decrease revenues while decreasing sales taxes remitted relative to B grades. These findings suggest that policy makers can incorporate public information into regulations to more strongly incentivize compliance.     

Genetic Screening and Disability Insurance: What Can We Learn From The Health Insurance Experience?

Genetic information may be used by health and disability insurance companies to deny or restrict coverage. How health insurance companies use genetic information, and how public policy has limited that use, can be illustrative for genetics and disability insurance policy.     

Judges and Juries: The Defense Case and Differences in Acquittal Rates

Kalven and Zeisel's (1966 ) classic study, The American Jury, concluded that juries were "in revolt" from the law when they acquitted when judges would have convicted. Using data collected by the National Center for State Courts to examine jury decision making in four different communities, this article reexamines the question of the judge and jury's respective fidelity to the law and evidence by examining the influence on judge and jury of the defendant's evidence, his criminal record, and his reason for refusing to plead. No data can tell us definitively whether the judge is correct and the jury in error when they disagree, but the data analyzed in the present study can tell us whether the factors that move the jury and fail to move the judge are or are not consistent with the innocence of the accused.     

Alexa,Alert Me When the Revolution Comes: Gender,Affect, and Labor in the Age of Home-Based Artificial Intelligence

The fantasy of automation is one of liberation from alienating tasks. Today, domestic artificial intelligence (AI) enacts this dream of frictionlessly offloading monotony. This article deploys theories of Marxist feminism, affective labor to interrogate domestic AI’s unprecedented promise of absorbing forms of labor we hardly acknowledged that we did. While these devices make the reproductive labor of the household legible as labor, we interrogate their quasi-emancipatory promise. We argue that devices such as Amazon’s Alexa or Google Home elide and reproduce the gendered and racialized dimensions of domestic labor, streamline this labor for capture by capital, and heighten the very affective dynamics they promise to ameliorate. Only critical political theories of work can illuminate the unfulfilled transformations and ongoing dominations of gender, race, and affect that saturate labor with domestic AI – expressed, we contend, by re-articulating the framework of the “social factory” to that of the “social server.”     

Comparing the Life-Cycle Costs of New Construction and Acquisition-Rehab of Affordable Multifamily Rental Housing

The cost of producing multifamily affordable housing may differ based on development type. Past attempts to compare the costs of producing multifamily housing through new construction or acquisition-rehab have been limited by an inability to adjust for variations in unit quality among different projects. The authors overcome this challenge by estimating the costs of developing and maintaining a property over a 50-year life cycle. Applying this approach to a convenience sample of 269 properties, the authors find new construction associated with life-cycle costs that are 25% to 45% higher than those of acquisition-rehab.