Community Organization
David Frankel & Oscar Volij
Journal of Economic Theory, forthcoming
Abstract:
Using only ordinal axioms, we characterize several multigroup school segregation indices: the Atkinson Indices for the class of school districts with a given fixed number of ethnic groups and the Mutual Information Index for the class of all districts. Properties of other school segregation indices are also discussed. In an empirical application, we document a weakening of the effect of ethnicity on school assignment from 1987/8 to 2007/8. We also show that segregation between districts within cities currently accounts for 33% of total segregation. Segregation between states, driven mainly by the distinct residental patterns of Hispanics, contributes another 32%.
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Public Schools, Public Housing: The Education of Children Living in Public Housing
Amy Ellen Schwartz, Brian McCabe, Ingrid Gould Ellen & Colin Chellman
Urban Affairs Review, September 2010, Pages 68-89
Abstract:
In the United States, public housing developments are predominantly located in neighborhoods with low median incomes, high rates of poverty and disproportionate concentrations of minorities. While research consistently shows that public housing developments are located in economically and socially disadvantaged neighborhoods, we know little about the characteristics of the schools serving students living in public housing. In this paper, we examine the characteristics of elementary and middle schools attended by students living in public housing developments in New York City. Using the proportion of public housing students attending each elementary and middle school as our weight, we calculate the weighted average of school characteristics to describe the typical school attended by students living in public housing. We then compare these characteristics to those of the typical school attended by other students throughout the city in an effort to assess whether students living in public housing attend systematically different schools than other students. We find no large differences between the resources of the schools attended by students living in public housing and the schools attended by their peers living elsewhere in the city; however, we find significant differences in student characteristics and performance on standardized exams. These school differences, however, fail to fully explain the performance disparities amongst students. Our results point to a need for more nuanced analyses of the policies and practices in schools, as well as the outside-of-school factors that shape educational success, to identify and address the needs of students in public housing.
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Child Health and Neighborhood Conditions: Results from a Randomized Housing Voucher Experiment
Jane Fortson & Lisa Sanbonmatsu
Journal of Human Resources, Fall 2010, Pages 840-864
Abstract:
Using data from the Moving to Opportunity randomized housing voucher experiment, we estimate the direct effects of housing and neighborhood quality on child health. We show that, five years after random assignment, housing mobility has little impact on overall health status, asthma, injuries, and body mass index. The few effects that we observe imply that being offered a voucher through the program might worsen some aspects of child health, despite significant improvements in housing quality, nutrition and exercise, and neighborhood safety. Our results are inconsistent with the hypothesis that neighborhood conditions explain much of the widely-cited income gradient in child health.
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Hana Brown
Ethnic and Racial Studies, September 2010, Pages 1392-1411
Abstract:
Existing research demonstrates that black population size in a given area correlates with the passage of racially restrictive policies in that area. This paper examines the mechanisms through which minority population size translates into exclusionary policies. It does so by examining a little-known but critical aspect of US civil rights history: the development of policies which allowed white communities to close their public schools entirely rather than desegregate. Using comparative-historical methods to build on existing quantitative studies, this analysis demonstrates that, while black population size does correlate with the passage of restrictive policies, the adoption of school closing policies was primarily a political strategy used to counter rising black political mobilization. That is, whites were not responding to a demographic threat per se or to increasing contact with blacks, as extant work might suggest. Rather, restrictive policies were a response to increasing political activity and mobilization within black communities.
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Friends and Neighbors: Homeownership and Social Capital among Low- to Moderate-Income Families
Kim Manturuk, Mark Lindblad, Roberto Quercia
Journal of Urban Affairs, October 2010, Pages 471-488
Abstract:
This research explores whether homeownership leads to increased individual social capital among low- to moderate-income families. Social capital refers to social resources a person can access through contacts with others in his or her social networks. We theorize that homeownership can motivate interactions with others in one's neighborhood and therefore build social capital. Using a sample of low- and moderate-income homeowners and a matched sample of renters, we collect data on overall social resources and neighborhood-specific social resources. We find that homeowners have more total social capital resources and more neighborhood social capital resources than renters. Neighborhood group involvement has an indirect effect on social capital, but explains only a small amount of the influence of homeownership. These findings hold when controlling for household-level and neighborhood-level sociodemographic variables, as well as when using statistical models that account for endogeneity. Based on this evidence, we conclude that homeownership gives people access to social capital via increased social ties to others. We discuss the implications of this finding for housing policy and suggest new directions for research on social capital.
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Residential mobility, well-being, and mortality
Shigehiro Oishi & Ulrich Schimmack
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, June 2010, Pages 980-994
Abstract:
We tested the relation between residential mobility and well-being in a sample of 7,108 American adults who were followed for 10 years. The more residential moves participants had experienced as children, the lower the levels of well-being as adults. As predicted, however, the negative association between the number of residential moves and well-being was observed among introverts but not among extraverts. We further demonstrated that the negative association between residential mobility and well-being among introverts was explained by the relative lack of close social relationships. Finally, we found that introverts who had moved frequently as children were more likely to have died during the 10-year follow-up. Among extraverts, childhood residential mobility was unrelated to their mortality risk as adults. These findings indicate that residential moves can be a risk factor for introverts and that extraversion can be an interpersonal resource for social relationships and well-being in mobile societies.
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Chris Herbst & Erdal Tekin
NBER Working Paper, August 2010
Abstract:
In recent years, child care subsidies have become an integral part of federal and state efforts to move economically disadvantaged parents from welfare to work. Although previous empirical studies consistently show that these employment-related subsidies raise work levels among this group, little is known about the impact of subsidy receipt on child well-being. In this paper, we identify the causal effect of child care subsidies on child development by exploiting geographic variation in the distance that families must travel from home in order to reach the nearest social service agency that administers the subsidy application process. Using data from the Kindergarten cohort of the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, our instrumental variables estimates suggest that children receiving subsidized care in the year before kindergarten score lower on tests of cognitive ability and reveal more behavior problems throughout kindergarten. However, these negative effects largely disappear by the time children reach the end of third grade. Our results point to an unintended consequence of a child care subsidy regime that conditions eligibility on parental employment and deemphasizes child care quality.
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Does Money Matter? The Effects of Cash Transfers on Child Development in Rural Ecuador
Christina Paxson & Norbert Schady
Economic Development and Cultural Change, October 2010, Pages 187-229
Abstract:
A large body of research indicates that child development is sensitive to early‐life environments, so that poor children are at higher risk for poor cognitive and behavioral outcomes. These developmental outcomes are important determinants of success in adulthood. Yet, remarkably little is known about whether poverty‐alleviation programs improve children's developmental outcomes. We examine how a government‐run cash transfer program for poor mothers in rural Ecuador influenced the development of young children. Random assignment at the parish level is used to identify program effects. Our data include a set of measures of cognitive ability that are not typically included in experimental or quasi‐experimental studies of the impact of cash transfers on child well‐being, as well as a set of physical health measures that may be related to developmental outcomes. The cash transfer program had positive, although modest, effects on the physical, cognitive, and socioemotional development of the poorest children in our sample.
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Elizabeth Votruba-Drzal et al.
Child Development, September/October 2010, Pages 1460-1474
Abstract:
Research examining the longer term influences of child care on children's development has expanded in recent years, but few studies have considered low-income children's experiences in community care arrangements. Using data from the Three-City Study (N = 349), the present investigation examines the influences of child care quality, extent and type on low-income children's development of behavior problems during middle childhood (7-11 years old). Higher levels of child care quality were linked to moderate reductions in externalizing behavior problems. High-quality child care was especially protective against the development of behavior problems for boys and African American children. Child care type and the extent of care that children experienced were generally unrelated to behavior problems in middle childhood.
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Facial symmetry in young girls and boys from a slum and a control area of Ankara, Turkey
Bariş Özener & Bernhard Fink
Evolution and Human Behavior, November 2010, Pages 436-441
Abstract:
Deviations from perfect symmetry in paired traits of otherwise bilateral symmetrical organisms are thought to reflect developmental quality, especially the ability to resist environmental perturbations early in ontogeny. It is well established that poor environmental conditions increase developmental instability (DI) as reflected by measurements of fluctuating asymmetry. In humans, there is evidence that DI relates to numerous fitness components, and studies have found that perceptions of facial attractiveness for example are positively correlated with measurements of facial symmetry. Here we report the data on measurements of facial symmetry of 503 Turkish senior year high school students aged 17 to 18 years, of whom 133 males and 117 females were recruited from a slum district of Şentepe in Ankara (Group 1), and 131 males and 122 females from three high schools in wealthy central urban areas (Group 2). Digital images were used to assess the degree of facial asymmetry as measured from seven paired traits and calculated as a composite score. Facial asymmetry of participants in Group 1 (slum district) was significantly higher than that of participants in Group 2 (urban areas). Moreover, males in Group 1 were found to have higher facial asymmetry than females, while no sex difference was observed in Group 2. We conclude that poor living conditions have an influence on DI in humans, which manifests itself in the form of facial asymmetry, and that this might be particularly true for males.
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Mara Violato, Stavros Petrou, Ron Gray & Maggie Redshaw
Health Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
This study investigates the extent to which family income is associated with an extensive range of child cognitive and behavioural outcomes in a cohort of almost 19 000 British children born between 2000 and 2001. Merging the economists' and developmental psychologists' approaches, it also attempts to identify the main mechanisms through which family economic resources translate into better developmental outcomes for children. The relative and joint relevance of three groups of mediating factors (parental stress, parental investment and other family-related pathways), identified from the recent economic and psychological literature, are examined both in a cross-sectional (‘mopping-up' approach) and in a panel data (fixed effects models) context. Results indicate a weak or absent direct effect of family economic resources on child development after controlling for potential mediating mechanisms. The study also identifies key mediating factors (e.g. maternal depression, a cognitively stimulating home environment, parenting practices and length of breastfeeding) that could be targeted by government initiatives in order to effectively improve children's intellectual development and behaviour beyond what income redistribution can achieve.
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Janet Lauritsen & Karen Heimer
Criminology & Public Policy, November 2010, Pages 665-692
Abstract:
In this article, we use data from the 1973 to 2005 National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) to estimate previously unknown trends in serious nonfatal violent victimization for Latino, non-Latino Black, and non-Latino White males in the United States. Past research has shown that Blacks and Latinos have been more susceptible than Whites to financial hardship during economic downturns and that economic disadvantage is an important correlate of violence in cross-sectional analyses. If significant declines in the national economy contribute to increases in violence, then crime trends disaggregated by race and ethnicity should show greater changes among minorities during periods of economic downturn. Although rates of violence have declined for all groups, we find that trends for Latino and Black males are similar and closely follow changes in consumer sentiment. In contrast, trends for White males display fewer fluctuations coinciding with changes in economic conditions. Continued disaggregation shows that these patterns appear primarily in stranger violence and not in violence by known offenders. The patterns also suggest that the association between changing economic conditions and male victimization trends might have weakened in recent years.
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Stanley Zammit et al.
Archives of General Psychiatry, September 2010, Pages 914-922
Context: Incidence of schizophrenia and other nonaffective psychoses is greater in urban than rural areas, but the reason is unclear. Few studies have examined whether both individual and neighborhood characteristics can explain this association. Furthermore, as has been shown for ethnicity, the effect of individual characteristics may depend on neighborhood context.
Objectives: To examine (1) whether individual, school, or area characteristics are associated with psychosis and can explain the association with urbanicity and (2) whether effects of individual characteristics on risk of psychosis vary according to school context (reflecting both peer group and neighborhood effects).
Design: Multilevel longitudinal study of all individuals born in Sweden in 1972 and 1977. Diagnoses were identified through linkage with the Swedish National Patient Register until December 31, 2003.
Setting: Population-based.
Participants: A total of 203 829 individuals with data at individual, school, municipality, and county levels.
Main Outcome Measures: Any nonaffective psychosis, including schizophrenia (881 subjects; 0.43% cumulative incidence). For the study of interactions, the outcome was any psychosis (1944 subjects; 0.95% cumulative incidence).
Results: Almost all the variance in risk of nonaffective psychosis was explained by individual-level rather than higher-level variation. An association between urbanicity and nonaffective psychosis was explained by higher-level characteristics, primarily school-level social fragmentation. We observed cross-level interactions between individual- and school-level markers of ethnicity, social fragmentation, and deprivation on risk of developing any psychotic disorder, all with qualitative patterns of interaction.
Conclusions: The association between urbanicity and psychosis appears to be a reflection of increased social fragmentation present within cities. The qualitative interactions observed are consistent with a hypothesis that certain characteristics that define individuals as being different from most other people in their local environment may increase risk of psychosis. These findings have potentially important implications for understanding the etiology of psychotic disorders and for informing social policy.
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Michael Kramer, Hannah Cooper, Carolyn Drews-Botsch, Lance Waller & Carol Hogue
Social Science & Medicine, forthcoming
Abstract:
Residential isolation segregation (a measure of residential inter-racial exposure) has been associated with rates of preterm birth (<37 weeks gestation) experienced by black women. Epidemiologic differences between very preterm (<32 weeks gestation) and moderately preterm births (32-36 weeks) raise questions about whether this association is similar across gestational ages, and through what pathways it might be mediated. Hierarchical Bayesian models were fit to answer three questions: is the isolation-prematurity association similar for very and moderately preterm birth; is this association mediated by maternal chronic disease, socioeconomic status, or metropolitan area crime and poverty rates; and how much of the geographic variation in black-white very preterm birth disparities is explained by isolation segregation? Singleton births to black and white women in 231 U.S. metropolitan statistical areas in 2000-2002 were analyzed and isolation segregation was calculated for each. We found that among black women, isolation is associated with very preterm birth and moderately preterm birth. The association may be partially mediated by individual level socioeconomic characteristics and metropolitan level violent crime rates. There is no association between segregation and prematurity among white women. Isolation segregation explains 28% of the geographic variation in black-white very preterm birth disparities. Our findings highlight the importance of isolation segregation for the high-burden outcome of very preterm birth, but unexplained excess risk for prematurity among black women is substantial.
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Variations in Health and Health Behaviors by Nativity Among Pregnant Black Women in Philadelphia
Irma Elo & Jennifer Culhane
American Journal of Public Health, November 2010, Pages 2185-2192
Objectives: We compared health behaviors and health outcomes among US born, African-born, and Caribbean-born pregnant Black women and examined whether sociodemographic and psychosocial characteristics explained differences among these population subgroups.
Methods: We analyzed data from a prospective cohort study conducted in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, with a series of nested logistic regression models predicting tobacco, alcohol, and marijuana use and measures of physical and mental health.
Results: Foreign-born Black women were significantly less likely to engage in substance use and had better self-rated physical and mental health than did native-born Black women. These findings were largely unchanged by adjustment for sociodemographic and psychosocial characteristics. The foreign-born advantage varied by place of birth: it was somewhat stronger for African-born women than for Caribbean-born women.
Conclusions: Further studies are needed to gain a better understanding of the role of immigrant selectivity and other characteristics that contribute to more favorable health behaviors and health outcomes among foreign-born Blacks than among native-born Blacks in the United States.
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Behavior, Human Capital and the Formation of Gangs
Antony Dnes & Nuno Garoupa
Kyklos, November 2010, Pages 517-529
Abstract:
Behavior in dysfunctional social groups is often regarded by social scientists as irrational in nature. We focus on many features of behavior within the street gang, also noting the existence of other gang-like groups, and show how apparently irrational behavior can signal the possession of valuable human capital. We contend that gangs are formed around particular traits of direct value to the group, and therefore of indirect value to the gang member, and construct a model with a separating equilibrium consistent with the existence of a large gap between the characteristics of gang members and the rest of society. Policy implications include a deduction that increasing the opportunities for gang members outside of life in the gang, perhaps through offering an amnesty, might reduce gangs but will unambiguously make remaining gangs even nastier.
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‘Sent Down' in China: Stratification Challenged but Not Denied
Zhenchao Qian & Randy Hodson
Research in Social Stratification and Mobility, forthcoming
Abstract:
Dramatic shocks to social systems can disrupt normal social processes such as life course sequences and socioeconomic attainment. Such shocks provide a rare opportunity for contrasting normal and extraordinary social processes and thus revealing social structures and processes that may otherwise be invisible. The current article focuses on the 'sent-down' generation in China of the 1960s and 1970s, many of whom were forcibly relocated to the countryside following middle or high school graduation to "learn from the peasants." Although most of these young people eventually returned to urban areas, the experience was traumatic for at least some and disrupted normal life course developments and process of socioeconomic attainment for many. This is especially the case for those who stayed in the countryside for an extended period of time. Data from the Chinese General Social Survey indicate that both the formal and informal power of parents was unable to protect children from being sent down. Nevertheless, as the process matured, stratification forces reemerged in the ability of politically well placed parents to facilitate the early return of their children. Despite some success in attaining college education and Communist Party membership for the sent-down generation, sent-down men report more unhappiness with life than their non-sent-down counterparts and sent-down men and women report much earlier retirement and withdrawal from the labor force than non-sent-down women. These findings collaborate and extend prior research on the sent-down generation and illustrate the lasting effects of both inequality and of attempts to change inequality.
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Can a City Successfully Shrink? Evidence from Survey Data on Neighborhood Quality
Justin Hollander
Urban Affairs Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
Urban policymakers and planners tend to view population decline as a bad thing and a vast infrastructure of funding and regulation reinforces this idea. An emerging body of research has challenged this mindset by reframing decline as shrinkage and experimenting with new policy tools under the rubric of smart decline. But the question of whether decline impairs quality of life in cities is a conceptually murky one. This paper operationalizes quality of life by examining survey data for 38 U.S. cities on perceptions of neighborhood quality. The results show a high level of heterogeneity among shrinking cities in terms of perceptions of neighborhood quality, with some cities experiencing both loss in housing and population while increasing overall perceptions of neighborhood quality. Future research ought to probe these relationships further to better understand how smart decline might affect neighborhood change.