The spatial mismatch hypothesis: A review of recent studies and their implications for welfare reform

Abstract

In 1992, Housing Policy Debate published John Kain's comprehensive review of the extensive scholarly literature on the spatial mismatch hypothesis. This hypothesis maintains that the suburbanization of jobs and involuntary housing market segregation have acted together to create a surplus of workers relative to the number of available jobs in submetropolitan areas where blacks are concentrated.

Since Kain's review, more than two dozen new studies on the spatial mismatch hypothesis have been completed. Generally, these studies use more suitable data and superior methodologies than earlier studies and therefore provide the most reliable evidence to date on the spatial mismatch hypothesis. This article critically reviews the new studies and assesses what implications can be drawn for welfare reform.     

LAND,LIVELIHOODS, AND REMITTANCES

This article seeks to draw connections between a political ecology of global investment in resource sector development and a culturally informed understanding of rural out-migration across the Lao–Thai border. The author highlights how the departures of rural youth for wage labor in Thailand and the remittances they return to sending villages are becoming important for understanding agrarian transformations in Laos today. In the first section the author introduces the contemporary context of cross-border migrations across the Lao–Thai Mekong border. The second section shifts focus to a village in Laos's central Khammouane Province, where extended field research was conducted between 2006 and 2009. In this village, youth out-migration to Thailand has become a widespread phenomenon, with nearly every household involved. The segmented cultural and gendered features of this migration and its salience for understanding contemporary transformations in this locale invite a broadening of agrarian studies analysis. The final section expands upon how political ecology can provide such a broader analysis by drawing attention to how extractive resource projects affect local tenure rights and livelihoods, with significant rents captured by the state and resource firms. By making these connections, the author argues there are coercive underpinnings to contemporary Mekong migrations, which may be linked to governance problems in the Lao resource sector.     

The Structure of Utility in Spatial Models of Voting

Empirical models of spatial voting allow legislators' locations in a policy or ideological space to be inferred from their roll‐call votes. These are typically random utility models where the features of the utility functions other than the ideal points are assumed rather than estimated. In this article, we first consider a model in which legislators' utility functions are allowed to be a mixture of the two most commonly assumed utility functions: the quadratic function and the Gaussian function assumed by NOMINATE. Across many roll‐call data sets, we find that legislators' utility functions are estimated to be very nearly Gaussian. We then relax the usual assumption that each legislator is equally sensitive to policy change and find that extreme legislators are generally more sensitive to policy change than their more centrally located counterparts. This result suggests that extremists are more ideologically rigid while moderates are more likely to consider influences that arise outside liberal‐conservative conflict.     

Stalin's moustache: The Soviet Union and the coming of war

Michael Jabara Carley, 1939. The Alliance That Never Was and the Coming of World War II (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1999), pp.xxv + 321. ISBN 1–56663–252–8.

Patrick R. Osborn, Operation Pike. Britain Versus the Soviet Union, 1939–1941 (Westport, CT and London, 2000), pp.xiii + 274. ISBN 0–313–31368–7

Gabriel Gorodetsky, Grand Delusion. Stalin and the German Invasion of Russia (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999), pp.xvi + 408. ISBN 0–300–07792–0.     

Explaining the Divergence in Asylum Grant Rates among Immigration Judges: An Attitudinal and Cognitive Approach

In seeking to understand the variation in asylum grant rates by immigration judges (IJs), we apply a variation of the attitudinal model that we modify by incorporating a cognitive model of decision making, arguing that some pieces of information before IJs are treated objectively while others are treated subjectively. This model allows us to account for informational cues that influence decisions while assessing the impact of national interests and human rights conditions. We find that IJ policy predispositions play a dominant role, and that liberal IJs respond to applicant characteristics differently than conservatives, but also that the law constrains decision making.     

Congressional apportionment and the fourteenth amendment

This paper examines state interest in the nine bases of congressional seat apportionment considered for the House of Representatives as part of the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution. We ask, what if voters preferred apportionments that delivered larger vote shares to their state? We then show that among all states, one basis of apportionment was a weak Condorcet winner, while the others were in a vote cycle. In both chambers of Congress, however, pure majority voting created orderings of the nine bases and a different Condorcet winner. Ironically, Congress did not select either Condorcet winner. Instead, a population-based apportionment was reported out of committee and passed both chambers as a consequence of agenda control and lack of pairwise voting. Our analysis provides an example of how agenda setting with incomplete information unintentionally can produce undesirable outcomes for a legislature.

     

Global policymakers and catastrophic risk

Policy Sciences - There is a rapidly developing literature on risks that threaten the whole of humanity, or a large part of it. Discussion is increasingly turning to how such risks can be governed....     

Gridlock and Delegation in a Changing World

Fixed statutes and regulations often have variable consequences over time. If left unattended, such drift can severely erode the performance of government as an institution of representation. To better understand the mechanics of policy‐making in a changing world, we develop a positive theory that captures political drift in a dynamic separation‐of‐powers system. We show analytically that a distinctive combination of legislative supermajoritarianism and agency discretion—institutional features that, in isolation, elicit widespread criticism—can effectively ameliorate policies' susceptibility to the vicissitudes of exogenous change. The critical mechanism for governmental accommodation of drift is delegation, which increases all decision makers' well‐being by reducing fluctuations in outcomes. Although the complete smoothing of outcomes is attainable in a separation‐of‐ powers system, we show that this is typically not achieved in equilibrium. The presence of drift provides an opportunity for self‐interested legislators to extract a distributional benefit from their fellow legislators at the expense of overall policymaking efficiency.