Do Neighborhood Effects on Low-Income Minority Children Depend on Their Age? Evidence From a Public Housing Natural Experiment

We analyze data from a natural experiment involving Denver public housing that quasirandomly assigns low-income Latino and African American youth to neighborhoods. Intent-to-treat and treatment-on-treated models reveal substantial effects of neighborhood socioeconomic status, ethnicity, and safety domains on youth and young adult educational, employment, and fertility outcomes. Effects are contingent on when a youth was first assigned to public housing and the neighborhood characteristic in question. Benefits from neighbors of higher occupational prestige are stronger if a child begins experiencing them at a younger age, whereas negative consequences of neighborhood crime are only manifested for teens. Neighborhood effect sizes apparently depend on the interaction among exposure duration, disruption effects of mobility, and developmental stage-specific differences in vulnerability to the given neighborhood effect mechanism operative. Our results hold powerful and provocative implications for where assisted housing should be developed and how applicants should be assigned to neighborhoods.     

Assessing the property value impacts of the dispersed subsidy housing program in Denver

This study tests the hypothesis that the acquisition of existing property by the public housing authority and its subsequent rehabilitation and occupancy by subsidized tenants significantly reduced the property values of surrounding single‐family homes in Denver during the 1990s. This assessment examined pre‐ and post‐occupancy sales, while controlling for the idiosyncratic neighborhood, local public service, and zoning characteristics of the areas in order to identify which sorts of neighborhoods, if any, experienced declining property values as a result of proximity to dispersed housing tenants. The analyses revealed that proximity to a subsidized housing site generally had an independent, positive effect on single‐family home sales prices. The most notable exception to this pattern occurred in neighborhoods more than 20 percent of whose residents were black. Proximity to dispersed public housing sites in these neighborhoods resulted in slower growth in home sales prices in an other‐wise booming housing market and suggest a threshold within “vulnerable” neighborhoods whereby any potential gains associated with rehabilitating existing units are offset by the increased concentration of poor residents. © 2001 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

Tree‐Based Models for Political Science Data

Political scientists often find themselves analyzing data sets with a large number of observations, a large number of variables, or both. Yet, traditional statistical techniques fail to take full advantage of the opportunities inherent in “big data,” as they are too rigid to recover nonlinearities and do not facilitate the easy exploration of interactions in high‐dimensional data sets. In this article, we introduce a family of tree‐based nonparametric techniques that may, in some circumstances, be more appropriate than traditional methods for confronting these data challenges. In particular, tree models are very effective for detecting nonlinearities and interactions, even in data sets with many (potentially irrelevant) covariates. We introduce the basic logic of tree‐based models, provide an overview of the most prominent methods in the literature, and conduct three analyses that illustrate how the methods can be implemented while highlighting both their advantages and limitations.     

Intelligence reform commissions and the producer–consumer relationship

Since 1949 intelligence reform efforts have resulted in extensive studies on every aspect of the intelligence community. One common aspect of commission comment has been how policy-makers interact with the intelligence products, commonly known as the producer–consumer relationship. Decades of successive commissions identify the same or similar problems with the relationship and recommend organizational changes aimed at improving the analyst – policy maker interaction. Eventually, the same issues arise because most structural reforms are incapable of addressing critical aspects of this relationship. Future efforts should first consider previous commission results as well as understand what reforms can and cannot impact this relationship.     

Chinese networks and enterprise development: Malaysian investments in China

This study assesses the argument that common ethnic identity has facilitated the creation of transnational business networks leading to the rise of a new economically powerful “global tribe” comprising ethnic Chinese from East and Southeast Asia. The primary contention in this article is that a network with the economic clout of a “global tribe” would entail interlocking stock-ownership ties, a sharing of resources and cooperation to the point of merger. Through an in-depth analysis of investments in China by ethnic Chinese from Malaysia, this article proves that even major Chinese-owned companies have little or no interlocking stock ownership and directorate links, either domestically or across borders, with other Chinese-owned companies. The growing inflow of investments into China by ethnic Chinese from Southeast Asia is primarily due to endeavours by government leaders in the region and China to encourage businesses to invest in the Mainland.     

Hot spots policing in a high-crime environment: an experimental evaluation in Medellín

Journal of Experimental Criminology - Test direct, spillover, and aggregate effects of hot spots policing on crime in a high-crime environment. We identified 967 hot spot street segments and...     

When public-sector salaries become public knowledge: Academic salaries and Ontario's Public Sector Salary Disclosure Act

Abstract: The effects of salary disclosure on public-sector compensation have long been a source of controversy in political and academic circles. Some commentators suggest that because of political pressure and closer public scrutiny, salary disclosure is a good thing because it results in pay that is both lower than it would otherwise be and more sensitive to performance. On the other hand, disclosure raises serious privacy considerations and could also have an inflationary effect on salaries unless all elements in a causal chain linking public knowledge and lower pay are firmly in place. In this study, the authors examine the implications of Ontario's Public Sector Salary Disclosure Act with respect to university-sector salaries. The main conclusions are that salary disclosure, in general, and in the academic sector in particular, has never fully accounted for proper comparability issues and has not been updated to reflect adjustments for inflation. The act also raises important questions of privacy that have not been fully addressed. Perhaps most notably, there is no evidence suggesting that salary disclosure has much of an influence in off-setting other factors affecting salary growth.     

Acculturative Stress,Perceived Discrimination,and Vulnerability to Suicide Attempts Among Emerging Adults

Cultural factors are often neglected in studies of suicidal behavior among emerging adults. The present study examined acculturative stress and perceived discrimination as statistical predictors of a suicide attempt history among an ethnically diverse sample of 969 emerging adults, ages 18–25 (M = 18.8). Females made up 68% of the sample, and the racial/ethnic composition included Asian, Latino, Black, and White (US-born and non-US-born) individuals. There were no statistically significant racial/ethnic differences in endorsement of a suicide attempt history, with an overall rate of 8% in the sample. Asian participants reported higher acculturative stress than all other racial/ethnic groups, while both Asian and Black participants reported having experienced more discrimination in the previous year, compared to other groups. Logistic regression analyses suggested that familial acculturative stress was associated with 2 times higher odds of endorsing a past suicide attempt, overall. More specifically, it was associated with over 2 times higher odds among Asian participants, over 4 times higher odds among Black participants, and over 3 times higher odds among non-US-born White participants, while social acculturative stress was associated with over 3 times higher odds of endorsing a past suicide attempt among Latino participants. Environmental acculturative stress was associated with decreased odds of endorsing a suicide attempt history, overall, but not when examined separately by racial/ethnic group. Perceived discrimination was associated with over 5 times higher odds of a suicide attempt, overall, and specifically was associated with over 3 times higher odds among Latino participants and over 10 times higher odds among White, US-born participants. These findings suggest the importance of addressing culturally-related variables in treatment with emerging adults of racially/ethnically diverse backgrounds to reduce risk for suicidal behavior.