scholarly journals Do White Police Officers Unfairly Target Black Suspects?

2022 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. p12
Author(s):  
John R. Lott, Jr ◽  
Carlisle E. Moody

Using a unique data set we link the race of police officers who kill suspects with the race of those who are killed across the United States. We have data on a total of 2,706 fatal police killings for the years 2013 to 2015. This is 1,333 more killings by police than is provided by the FBI data on justifiable police homicides. We conducted three tests of discrimination. The results of these tests are different. In the first test we find some evidence that white officers are more likely to kill a black suspect who is later found to be unarmed than they are to kill an unarmed white suspect. However, this result could not be confirmed using a fixed effects model on panel data aggregated to the city level. In the second test, we find that white police officers are no more likely to kill an unarmed black suspect than are black or Hispanic officers. The results of this test are confirmed by the panel data version of the test. The third discrimination test indicated that black suspects, whether armed or not, are no more likely to be killed by a white officer than they are to be killed by black or Hispanic officers. Similarly, Hispanic suspects are no more likely to be killed by white offices than officers of other races. These results are also confirmed by panel data analyses. We find that when there is more than one officer on the scene, unarmed black suspects are not more likely to be killed by white police officers than unarmed white suspects. This could be evidence supporting a policy of reducing the number of officers working alone. Also, we find no evidence that body cameras affect either the number of police killings or the racial composition of those killings.

Author(s):  
Viktoriia Ahapova

The present article investigates the link between economic growth, namely GDP per capita, and the media activity represented with the indicator of the press freedom alongside other factors such as infrastructure, institutional conditions, and foreign direct investments. A panel of 179 countries was used for the period from 2000 to 2015. In particular, we run two panel data analysis models, fixed effects and random effects models, and examined their output with Hausman’s specification test, which pointed the fixed effects model as more efficient for the presented data set. However due to the presence of serial correlation, heteroskedastic, and cross-panel dependence, a Prais-Winsten regression with panel corrected standard errors (PCSE) was implemented. The comparative analysis of models of four country groups, divided by GNI per capita, was conducted. Both statistically significant correlation coefficients and models’ output provided evidence of an association between economic growth and the press activity.


2018 ◽  
Vol 83 (4) ◽  
pp. 744-770 ◽  
Author(s):  
Volker Ludwig ◽  
Josef Brüderl

This study reconsiders the phenomenon that married men earn more money than unmarried men, a key result of the research on marriage benefits. Many earlier studies have found such a “male marital wage premium.” Recent studies using panel data for the United States conclude that part of this premium is due to selection of high earners into marriage. Nevertheless, a substantial effect of marriage seems to remain. The current study investigates whether the remaining premium is really a causal effect. Using conventional fixed-effects models, previous studies statistically controlled for selection based on wage levels only. We suggest a more general fixed-effects model that allows for higher wage growth of to-be-married men. The empirical test draws on panel data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (1979 to 2012). We replicate the main finding of the literature: a wage premium remains after controlling for selection on individual wage levels. However, the remaining effect is not causal. The results show that married men earn more because selection into marriage operates not only on wage levels but also on wage growth. Hence, men on a steep career track are especially likely to marry. We conclude that arguments postulating a wage premium for married men should be discarded.


2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (Supplement_1) ◽  
pp. 40-41
Author(s):  
Hankyung Jun

Abstract Self-employed workers are often reported to have better health than salaried workers. Whether this is because self-employment has health benefits or healthier workers are self-employed is not clear. Self-employed workers may have higher job satisfaction due to higher levels of self-efficacy and autonomy, but may also experience higher job stress, uncertainty, and lack of health insurance leading to mental health problems. Self-employed workers in the U.S. may have different characteristics than those in Mexico and Korea given different working and living environments as well as different institutional arrangements. This study will examine the association between self-employment and mental and cognitive health for older adults in the U.S., Mexico, and South Korea. It uses harmonized panel data from the Health and Retirement Study, the Korean Longitudinal Study of Aging, and the Mexican Health and Aging Study. We compare the health and selection effect of self-employment using a pooled logistic model, fixed-effects model, and a bivariate probit model. In addition to comparing self-employed and salaried workers, we analyze differences between self-employed with and without employees. By using rich data and various models, we address reverse causality and estimate the relationship between self-employment and health. We show that the positive health effects of self-employed workers in the U.S. disappear once controlled for unobserved heterogeneity, indicating the possibility of healthier workers selecting into self-employment. Interestingly, for Korea and Mexico, healthier individuals seem to select into wage work which reflects the difference in working conditions across countries. Further analysis will show effects by business size.


2021 ◽  
pp. 002073142110189
Author(s):  
Germán M. Izón ◽  
Nathaniel Islip

Health care-based negative production externalities, such as greenhouse gas emissions, underscore the need for hospitals to implement sustainable practices. Eco-certification has been adopted by a number of providers in an attempt, for instance, to curb energy consumption. While these strategies have been evaluated with respect to cost savings, their implications pertaining to hospitals’ financial viability remain unknown. We specify a fixed-effects model to estimate the correlation between Energy Star certification and 3 different hospitals’ financial performance measures (net patient revenue, operating expenses, and operating margin) in the United States between 2000 and 2016. The Energy Star participation indicators’ parameters imply that this type of eco-certification is associated with lower net patient revenue and lower operating expenses. However, the estimated negative relationship between eco-certification and operating margin suggests that the savings in operating expenses are not enough for a hospital to achieve higher margins. These findings may indicate that undertaking sustainable practices is partially related to intangible benefits such as community reputation and highlight the importance of government policies to financially support hospitals’ investments in green practices.


2021 ◽  
Vol 35 (4) ◽  
pp. 3-28
Author(s):  
Emily Owens ◽  
Bocar Ba

The efficiency of any police action depends on the relative magnitude of its crime-reducing benefits and legitimacy costs. Policing strategies that are socially efficient at the city level may be harmful at the local level, because the distribution of direct costs and benefits of police actions that reduce victimization is not the same as the distribution of indirect benefits of feeling safe. In the United States, the local misallocation of police resources is disproportionately borne by Black and Hispanic individuals. Despite the complexity of this particular problem, the incentives facing both police departments and police officers tend to be structured as if the goals of policing were simple—to reduce crime by as much as possible. Formal data collection on the crime reducing-benefits of policing, and not the legitimacy costs, produce s further incentives to provide more engagement than may be efficient in any specific encounter, at both the officer and departmental level. There is currently little evidence as to what screening, training, or monitoring strategies are most effective at encouraging individual officers to balance the crime reducing benefits and legitimacy costs of their actions.


2019 ◽  
Vol 33 (4) ◽  
pp. 369-379 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xia Liu

Purpose Social bots are prevalent on social media. Malicious bots can severely distort the true voices of customers. This paper aims to examine social bots in the context of big data of user-generated content. In particular, the author investigates the scope of information distortion for 24 brands across seven industries. Furthermore, the author studies the mechanisms that make social bots viral. Last, approaches to detecting and preventing malicious bots are recommended. Design/methodology/approach A Twitter data set of 29 million tweets was collected. Latent Dirichlet allocation and word cloud were used to visualize unstructured big data of textual content. Sentiment analysis was used to automatically classify 29 million tweets. A fixed-effects model was run on the final panel data. Findings The findings demonstrate that social bots significantly distort brand-related information across all industries and among all brands under study. Moreover, Twitter social bots are significantly more effective at spreading word of mouth. In addition, social bots use volumes and emotions as major effective mechanisms to influence and manipulate the spread of information about brands. Finally, the bot detection approaches are effective at identifying bots. Research limitations/implications As brand companies use social networks to monitor brand reputation and engage customers, it is critical for them to distinguish true consumer opinions from fake ones which are artificially created by social bots. Originality/value This is the first big data examination of social bots in the context of brand-related user-generated content.


2020 ◽  
Vol 31 (11) ◽  
pp. 1351-1362
Author(s):  
Andreas Bjerre-Nielsen ◽  
Asger Andersen ◽  
Kelton Minor ◽  
David Dreyer Lassen

In this study, we monitored 470 university students’ smartphone usage continuously over 2 years to assess the relationship between in-class smartphone use and academic performance. We used a novel data set in which smartphone use and grades were recorded across multiple courses, allowing us to examine this relationship at the student level and the student-in-course level. In accordance with the existing literature, our results showed that students’ in-class smartphone use was negatively associated with their grades, even when we controlled for a broad range of observed student characteristics. However, the magnitude of the association decreased substantially in a fixed-effects model, which leveraged the panel structure of the data to control for all stable student and course characteristics, including those not observed by researchers. This suggests that the size of the effect of smartphone usage on academic performance has been overestimated in studies that controlled for only observed student characteristics.


2019 ◽  
Vol 48 (5) ◽  
pp. 1066-1093
Author(s):  
H. Daniel Heist ◽  
Danielle Vance-McMullen

Donor-advised funds (DAFs) are becoming increasingly popular in the United States. DAFs receive a growing share of all charitable donations and control a sizable proportion of grants made to other nonprofits. The growth of DAFs has generated controversy over their function as intermediary philanthropic vehicles. Using a panel data set of 996 DAF organizations from 2007 to 2016, this article provides an empirical analysis of DAF activity. We conduct longitudinal analyses of key DAF metrics, such as grants and payout rates. We find that a few large organizations heavily skew the aggregated data for a rather heterogeneous group of nonprofits. These panel data are then analyzed with macroeconomic indicators to analyze changes in DAF metrics during economic recessions. We find that, in general, DAF grantmaking is relatively resilient to recessions. We find payout rates increased during times of recession, as did a new variable we call the flow rate.


2016 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 43
Author(s):  
Fábio Pesavento ◽  
André Marques

The strong performance of the Brazilian economy during the 2000s allows the expansion of various sectors, including the advertising market, associated with the growth of the domestic market and the intensification of trade relations with other countries. The main objective of this study is to test the Relative Constancy Principle (RCP) in the context of greater integration with international economy, controlling for several factors that may exhibit some influence on the performance of the advertising market. We adopt a panel data of two periods for 49 countries and estimate a linear fixed effects model with dummies, controlling for the heterogeneity and unobserved factors of the countries. The results suggest that the advertising market of China, the United States and India have significant patterns above the average. The study does not support the RCP, yet they identify important regularities in those countries in relation to the advertising market. The level of activity and international reserves have a significant effect on the advertising market in countries; the higher the share of industry and services (urbanization), the higher the expenses on advertising; the inflation rate is nonlinearly related to the advertising market performance; the economic freedom index and the presence of Generations X and Y are associated with a reduction in advertising expenditure.


2017 ◽  
Vol 35 (23-24) ◽  
pp. 5526-5551 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francis L. Huang ◽  
Colleen Lloyd Eddy ◽  
Emily Camp

Violence directed toward teachers in schools is relatively understudied in comparison with other school-based forms of peer aggression (e.g., school bullying). Based on the nationally representative Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS) 2011-2012, approximately 10% of K-12 public school teachers in the United States, received a threat in the past 12 months and 6% reported being physically attacked. The effects of teacher-directed violence are far reaching and affect not just the victimized teacher, but the larger community itself. In the current study, we used multilevel logistic regression models with state fixed effects to analyze the SASS data set. The analytic sample consisted of 24,070 K-12 teachers in 4,610 public schools and specifically excluded special education teachers and teachers in alternative settings (i.e., online schools, special education centers, juvenile correction facilities). Guided by authoritative school climate theory, we tested for the beneficial associations of disciplinary structure and administrative support with the reduced likelihood of a teacher being threatened or physically attacked by a student, while controlling for teacher (e.g., gender, years of experience, race/ethnicity), school (e.g., school size, percent minority enrollment), and state-level factors. Results indicated that teachers who felt supported by the administration and worked with others (i.e., the principal and other teachers) who enforced the rules consistently were less likely to be victims of threats of injury or physical attacks. Although school climate has been shown to have a positive effect on student outcomes, the current study also suggests that school climate, characterized by consistent rule enforcement and supportive administrators and teachers, may play a role in reducing the likelihood of teacher victimization.


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