Segregation and the Geography of Creditworthiness: Racial Inequality in a Recovered Mortgage Market

The subprime boom and subsequent foreclosure crisis highlighted risk associated with pursuit of the American Dream of homeownership. People of color and those living in segregated areas were particularly harmed by the dramatic rise and fall of the housing market. Almost a decade after the economy’s collapse, questions remain about racial and spatial disparities in access to mortgage credit. I leverage Home Mortgage Disclosure Act data to explore mortgage application outcomes in 2014. Well into the economy’s recovery, minority borrowers remained at a disadvantage in the mortgage approval process. Whereas 71% of White applicants were approved for home loans, approval rates were lower for Asians (68%), Latinos (63%), and Blacks (54%). Black and Latino borrowers were also significantly more likely to receive higher cost loans than Whites, a practice that has accelerated since the foreclosure crisis. Results suggest that segregation exacerbated racial disparities as lenders funneled expensive credit into isolated minority communities. Furthermore, the differences between White and minority outcomes were largest in census tracts where subprime lending was common in 2006 and foreclosures accumulated during the Great Recession. Together, these findings indicate how spatially organized markets have racialized consequences in a highly segregated society.     

The transformation of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program

Between 2000 and 2005, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, until recently, the Food Stamp Program) caseload increased by half. As the Great Recession unfolded, the SNAP caseload grew even more rapidly. Further, over the past two decades the composition of the caseload has shifted sharply away from families combining food and cash assistance and toward families receiving food assistance in the absence of any other major, means‐tested income support. By analyzing components of the caseload separately, we provide new and more insightful estimates of the effects of food and cash assistance policies and the economy on both the change in the composition of the caseload and the large caseload swings over the 1990s and 2000s. We find that the economy can explain a portion of caseload changes, but not compositional shifts. Food and cash assistance policies help to explain both changes. In total, the combination of SNAP and welfare policy changes account for about half of the sharp increase since 1994 in the share of SNAP households receiving food, but not cash, assistance. © 2011 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

Averted targeted school killings from 1900-2016

Mass shootings, particularly those that occur on school grounds, often generate intense political debate. Following the 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglass High School, questions arose on how to prevent these tragedies. Typically, the response generated from these questions revolves around mental illness, bullying prevention, and gun control. Unfortunately, the views on these topics, especially gun control, are often rooted in a strong belief system which is unwavering. Resultantly, the debate on how to avert these incidents often stops at the debate phase. This study sought to better understand how these events can be prevented by examining targeted school killings from 1900–2016 in which the suspect was stopped before the attack. The analysis revealed that the majority of attacks were prevented by other students reporting the threat of an impending attack to school and law enforcement authorities.     

What is “prison culture”? Developing a theoretical and methodological foundation for understanding cultural schema in prison

What does it mean to say that a prison has a “culture?” Scholars have long emphasized the presence of a “prison code” and, more recently, a “racial code” as salient cultural domains in men's prisons. Yet, even though most people intuitively understand what is meant by “prison culture,” little progress has been made regarding the conceptualization and operationalization of culture as an analytical construct in prison scholarship. The current study makes two primary contributions to this literature. First, drawing on advances in anthropology, cultural sociology, and cognitive science, we incorporate the concept of cultural schema to provide a concrete analytical construct. Second, we test varying conceptualizations of cultural schema as either characterized by consensus or as overlapping relational structures. Using cultural consensus and correlational class analyses among a sample of 266 incarcerated men, we find little evidence of a culture of consensus for either the prison code or the racial code. Furthermore, we show evidence of heterogenous schema among these cultural domains. Our study is relevant to wider disciplinary work on culture as the problem of analytical precision we address is characteristic of much of the work in criminology and criminal justice that evokes culture as an explanatory device.     

The Dimensions and Effects of Reciprocity in Political Tolerance Judgments

Political Behavior - Reciprocity is a foundational concept of cooperative societies with roles in face-to-face and anonymous transactions. In essence, we trust others, follow social norms, and...     

Gender,Race, and Intersectionality in Campaign Finance

Political Behavior - Campaign finance research has given greater attention to race and gender, but, due to data limitations, only separately. Using new data on the ethnoracial and gender...     

Question Hour Activity and Party Behaviour in India

Based on a unique data set of Indian legislators and their behaviour during Question Hour over a 30-year period (1980–2009), the paper establishes that there is a substantial gap in the volume of questions asked by legislators from national and subnational parties, even after accounting for party size and other covariates. Thus, despite increasing subnational party prominence in the electoral and executive arenas, national parties dominate activities to do with legislative oversight. The paper also explores mechanisms that may explain the difference in legislative activity between national and subnational party legislators.