NIBRS Data Available for Secondary Analysis

The NIBRS data program currently being implemented by the FBI and local lawenforcement agencies has by now produced sufficient data for archiving anddistribution. Although not representative of crime in the United States, existing NIBRS data can be used to investigate the nature of crimesknown to the police compared to the traditional UCR data. The Bureau ofJustice Statistics has requested the National Archive of Criminal JusticeData to store and make NIBRS data available to interested users. The datafrom 1996 will shortly be available from the NACJD web site. The 1996 datacontain almost 6.5 million records and the FBI's full file includes about 361 Mbytes of data. The data have been disaggregated from the FBI's complex single file into 11 segment levels or record types. This makes theindividual record types easier and faster to analyze than using the fullfile, which more closely resembles a relational database than a hierarchicalfile. However, splitting apart the record types requires that specialprocedures be used to merge files of different record types, which would benecessary if a user were interested in analyzing variables appearing in morethan one record type (e.g., comparing offender and victim ages). These procedures are described, and a test comparing the time to run a simple frequencycount using the full file against the merged files shows that using themerged files is considerably more efficient. Also discussed are some futuredevelopments to facilitate the analysis of NIBRS data.     

Institutional conditions for the integration of immigrants in welfare states: A comparison of the literature on Germany,France, Great Britain,and the Netherlands

Abstract. In this paper we analyse the literature on a particular aspect of immigrant integration in Western European welfare states: the extent to which this can be explained by conditions set by institutions, social rights and rights of residence. Our focus is on health care, old age insurance, housing and vocational training, and on the circumstances under which migrants have access to benefits from the general systems of social security. In particular, the assignment of a legal position by the rights of residence plays an essential role. The various legal groups have access to social benefits depending on their status of residence. The institutional framework of each welfare states is also relevant to the access that people have to social benefits. In the countries analysed, Germany, France, Great Britain, and the Netherlands, the individual security systems are organised according to different political concepts, each of them allowing immigrants access to their benefits to a different degree. On the whole, the degree and kind of governmental regulations seem to be crucially important for the integration of immigrants into the welfare state.     

Reconsidering the principal components of central bank independence: The more the merrier?

We use principal component analysis to reassess the link between different attributes of central bank independence and inflation performance. We suggest that coding problems may account for the fact that almost none of the attributes included in the Cukierman index has a systematic, plausible relationship with inflation. The multi-faceted Cukierman index also seems to be out-performed by a much narrower index focusing solely on policy independence. These findings point to the importance of using public choice analysis to isolate the real problem here: namely, finding specific central bank structures that effectively insulate central bankers from political pressures.     

Christian Müller: Das vertragstheoretische Argument in der Ökonomik

Politische Vierteljahresschrift -     

Affirmative action,duality of error,and the consequences of mispredicting the academic performance of african american college applicants

The implications of different potential affirmative action policies depend on three factors: selection rate from the applicant pool, base rate of qualified applicants, and accuracy of performance predictions. A series of analyses was conducted under various assumptions concerning affirmative action plans, causes of racial differences in average college admissions test scores, and racial differences in accuracy of performance predictions. Evidence suggesting a lower level of predictive accuracy for African Americans implies that, under a program of affirmative action, both proportionately more false positives (matriculated students who do not succeed) and proportionately more false negatives (rejected applicants who could have succeeded) will be found among African American applicants. Unless equivalent levels of predictive accuracy are achieved for both groups, no admission policy can be fair simultaneously to majority group applicants and African American applicants. © 2002 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

Modes of participation over the adult life span

Sidney Verba and Norman Nie, in their 1972 workParticipation in America, advance the notion that political participation is not unidimensional, but is comprised of different modes. In recent years, the availability of panel and cross-sectional time series data has led to greater interest in the temporal dimension of political participation. Using data from nine American National Election Studies, we confirm the Verba and Nie findings with respect to voting and campaign participation and expand upon them. We examine the factor structure of indicators used in composite indices of voting and campaign participation and find that the structure of participation is stable across age groups, cohorts, and periods, confirming that composite indices of voting and campaign participation are not confounded by age, cohort, or period effects.This study was supported by grants from the Wayne State University Graduate School and the National Institute on Aging (NIA 5 AG06344-02).     

Invisible decisive coalitions in large hierarchies

This paper examines the extent to which organizational hierarchies are democratic or (in the more usual language of administrative studies) participative, in the sense that the views of a large proportion of organizational membership are taken into account when an organizational choice is made. We view organizations as making choices in a “bottom-up” manner: subordinates recommend options to their superior, and if subordinates are in sufficient agreement their superior accepts their advice. We prove that as the number of levels in the hierarchy increases, organizational choices can be dominated by a smaller and smaller proportion of the total organizational membership. In the limit, a vanishing small proportion of the membership can dominate policymaking.     

Books in review

His books include Two-Person Game Theory: The Essential Ideas; Fights, Games and Debates;and Mathematical Models in the Social Behavioral Sciences.