Information Shocks and the Take‐Up of Social Programs

The causes of participation in social programs have been studied extensively, with prominent roles found for program rules and benefits. A lack of information about these programs has been suggested as a cause of low participation rates among certain groups, but it is often difficult to distinguish between the role of information sharing and other features of a neighborhood, such as factors that are common to people of the same ethnicities or socioeconomic opportunities, or uniquely local methods of program implementation. We seek to gain new insight into the potential role of information flows by investigating what happens when information is disrupted. We exploit rich microdata from Florida vital records and program participation files to explore declines in Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) participation during pregnancy among foreign‐born Hispanics in the “information shock” period surrounding welfare reform. We identify how the size of these reductions is affected by having a high density of neighbors from the same place of origin. Specifically, we compare changes in WIC participation among Hispanic immigrants living in neighborhoods with a larger concentration of own‐origin immigrants to those with a smaller concentration of own‐origin immigrants, holding constant the size of the immigrant population and the share of immigrants in the neighborhood who are Hispanic. We find strong evidence that having a denser network of own‐origin immigrants mediated the information shock faced by immigrant women in the wake of welfare reform.     

The Impact of the 1994 Federal Assault Weapons Ban on Gun Markets: An Assessment of Short-Term Primary and Secondary Market Effects

The reactions of the gun market, including those of producers, wholesalers, retailers, and consumers, play an important role in shaping the potential impact of gun control policies on gun crime. As a case in point, this paper examines the federal Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, which bans a group of military-style semiautomatic firearms (i.e., assault weapons). Using a variety of national and local data sources, we assess the short-term (1994–1996) impact of the assault weapons ban on gun markets, examining trends in prices and production of the banned weapons in legal markets and assessing the availability of the banned weapons in illicit markets as measured by criminal use. Prices of assault weapons rose substantially around the time of the ban's enactment, reducing the availability of assault weapons to criminal users in the very short run. However, a surge in assault weapon production just before the ban caused prices to fall in the months following the ban. Implications of the findings for assessing this and other gun control policies are discussed.     

Teachers’ Conditional Regard and Students’ Need Satisfaction and Agentic Engagement: A Multilevel Motivation Mediation Model

Teachers’ conditional positive regard and conditional negative regard are common motivational techniques in the classroom. This study investigated their respective effects on adolescent students’ agentic engagement, while considering students’ basic psychological needs for autonomy and relatedness as potential mediators. Data collected from 30 teachers and 651 7th to 10th graders (52% female) were used to test a multilevel mediation model. The results indicated that teachers’ conditional negative regard undermined students’ agentic engagement by frustrating both of their autonomy and relatedness needs. Teachers’ conditional positive regard thwarted students’ sense of autonomy, which consequently undermined their agentic engagement. The findings are discussed in terms of conditional positive and negative regard as undesirable classroom motivational practices and the mechanisms through which they operate. The discussion also notes the importance of investigating contextual factors at the classroom level.

     

OUTCOMES OF FAMILY COUNSELING INTERVENTIONS WITH CHILDREN WHO RESIST VISITATION: AN ADDENDUM TO FRIEDLANDER AND WALTERS (2010)

Preliminary findings on the outcomes of family-focused counseling interventions for alienated and estranged children are presented based upon data from a longitudinal study of children in chronic custody disputes who were interviewed as young adults and from the clinical records of long-term therapy with these children who were resisting visitation.     

Balancing and the Bible: A Pre-Thucydidean View of Threat

This article uses the case of King Saul, David, and the Philistines, drawn from the Hebrew Bible (books 1 and 2 Samuel), to argue that leaders of states with contested or immature authority structures often elect to prioritize threats to their personal rule over external threats to the integrity and welfare of the states which they lead in a manner not predicted by neo-Realist international relations theory. In making this argument, this article not only makes a contribution to the Realist literature on threat prioritization but introduces a new, novel, and ancient data set which can be used both to generate new theories and to test existing theories within international relations.     

When the Line is Crossed... Paths to Control and Sanction Behaviour Necessitating a State Reaction

This article provides an overview of the various forms of proceedings available within 11 European criminal justice systems and reflects upon their core features. It also provides a picture of how far alternative, non-criminal proceedings are used by some of the systems as a different path to imposing a state reaction upon wrong-doers.     

A city-level analysis of property crime clearance rates

Theft, burglary, and vehicle theft are among the most frequently committed and least commonly cleared Part I offenses in the United States, but have received disproportionately little attention in the clearance literature. This study contributes to recent efforts to remedy this shortage by presenting offense-specific analyses of burglary, larceny, and vehicle theft clearance rates in a sample of 110 large US cities. Data were gathered from the Uniform Crime Report, the Law Enforcement Management and Administrative Statistics survey, and the American Community Survey. Independent variables comprised social disorganization measures (e.g. residential instability, poverty, etc.) and policing variables, including the use of broken windows policing. Although broken windows policing is related to higher clearance rates in a few prior studies, that effect was not observed in the present work. Racial diversity and police spending per capita (which were negatively associated with clearance rates) were the only variables that were significantly associated with the clearance of all three crimes.