Input Trade and Service Industry Productivity Growth

In this paper, I address two questions: (1) Does reducing tariffs for manufacturing inputs affect productivity in service industries? (2) Does the effect of input trade liberalization differ for importers in service and manufacturing industries? To answer these questions, I used an establishment-level survey of Uruguayan service industries from 1998 to 2005, a period in which the country reduced its tariffs on manufactured products. I found that service establishments that import inputs from abroad experience a larger increase in productivity relative to non-importers when input tariffs are reduced. Furthermore, the effects of trade liberalization are as significant in the service industries as in manufacturing.

Status, Maintenance of Security, and Militarized Foreign Policy

How does status affect foreign policy outcomes? Scholars have long argued that status is a salient foreign policy driver and that states even fight for status, but there is no consensus on how to think about this relationship. I propose that unpacking the link between status and role in international relations can help scholars analyze how status shapes national security outcomes. I illustrate the usefulness of this framework on the processes leading to Australia’s intervention in the Solomon Islands. An analysis of speeches by Australia’s leaders reveals that concern for maintaining Australia’s status as the leader of the Pacific and the role of maintainer of regional order and security affected the decision to dispatch an intervention.

Transforming Criminal Justice Internships into Capstone Courses: A Response to the Challenges of the COVID-19 Crisis

The COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020 resulted in the declaration of a national emergency that closed universities across the nation. With no warning, faculty were required to move classes from face-to-face to completely online instruction. This situation posed many difficulties, but particularly for faculty who were teaching and supervising students completing internships. Interns were removed from their internships abruptly as agencies and departments moved to essential personnel only. Faculty scrambled to create online learning experiences that met academic learning outcomes and the goals of criminal justice students enrolled in these courses. This paper details our experiences with these challenges, particularly as we revised criminal justice internship courses and developed capstone courses to replace face-to-face internship experiences. While the challenges we faced involved criminal justice internships, they were not unique to the major, and the approaches taken and lessons learned are likely applicable to a host of disciplines.

Looking for Better: A History of Black Southern Migrations

A broad overview of migrations affecting black southerners is presented, including the Atlantic slave trade, the domestic slave trade, colonization movements to Sierra Leone and Liberia, the Exoduster movement, the Great Migration, and the Return South migration. Emigrants convey their experiences and motivations through testimonies and personal accounts. Surviving the trauma of forced migrations, black southerners organized numerous migration movements both outside and within American polities in search of better opportunities. In the late 20th century, black southerners also initiated a return migration to the American South and have since achieved notable socioeconomic and political progress.

Effects of States’ Laws on Youth Physical Activity Participation and Obesity Prevalence

The alarming prevalence of obesity and lack of physical activity among adolescents led to immediate policy action to address these concerns. Accordingly, many states introduced and enacted their own legislation to encourage physical activity in schools. Few studies have explored the effectiveness of the new legislation, however, especially at the state level. To answer the fundamental question of whether policy is effective and to describe the varying effects of state obesity policies, this study analyzed the Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System from 2007 to 2017. Using the difference-in-differences method, this study found that legislative efforts to encourage physical activity had a significant and substantial effect on enhancing physical-activity participation and reducing adolescent obesity; however, subgroup analyses revealed that the effect was concentrated on female and white adolescents only. Additionally, the subsequent sensitivity analysis revealed that since 2015, when national attention started to divert to new health concerns (opioid abuse, for example), physical activity levels pulled back to 2009 levels. Rates of obesity and overweight have been on a sharp rise again since 2015. Lawmakers should reconsider changes in the law merging physical environments with digital environments, particularly for members of Generation Alpha, who will have ever more enticements for screen time.

A Terror to the People: The Evolution of an Outlaw Gang in the Lower Midwest

The details of the heretofore unexamined Reeves Gang may serve as an important case study of violence and lawlessness in the Lower Midwest in the decades following the Civil War. Unlike the “social bandits” such as the Jesse James and Dalton Gangs of the Middle Border region, most outlaw gangs made little attempt to get along with locals. These groups ruled by fear and typically fell afoul of vigilante hangings and shootings— a one-act play, if you will. The Reeves Gang, the focus of this study, would come to be atypical, their tale turning into a three-act play, moving from petty crime to more sophisticated criminal activities, and then to an attempted life of normalcy. Though now long forgotten, several instances of the Reeves Gang’s violent activities, as well as their eventual capture, were to be found in newspapers across the nation at the time.

Diabetes Care in an Urban Indigenous American Community: Challenges and Suggestions for the Future

Indigenous Americans living with type 2 diabetes in urban areas like Chicago face significant challenges to meeting the care recommendations of their medical providers. Based upon mixed-methods research, including both qualitative and quantitative measures, in Chicago’s Indigenous community, I have found that diabetes-care and -prevention challenges faced by individuals in this community include (1) the high financial and time costs of care, (2) lack of recognition of or response to acute symptoms of high glucose levels, (3) prioritization of other life responsibilities, (4) distrust of western medicine, and (5) fatalistic views about diabetes development and prognosis. If we are to reduce rates of type 2 diabetes and its related complications in Indigenous American populations, we need to reframe our view of who Indigenous peoples are and what the type 2 diabetes epidemic means in these communities, and consider how to best develop solutions for care that are feasible in urban settings. This aim can be achieved through a greater awareness of the challenges faced by urban Natives caring for type 2 diabetes and by engaging with these communities to develop collaborative programs to improve care in these settings.

100 Years after Suffrage: Just How Far Have Women Come?

Women earned the right to vote 100 years ago with the ratification of the 19th Amendment, effectively ending the suffrage movement that had transpired over generations. Their hard-won victory doubled the American electorate and provided women with an essential right of citizenship of which they had long been deprived. Not all women were welcomed at the polling place, though, and the exclusion of women of color, particularly in the Jim Crow South, revealed yet another barrier to eventually be struck down. In the 100 years since women earned their right to vote, they have begun “outvoting” their male counterparts and emerged as candidates for office in every branch and at every level of government. Despite great success, women are still underrepresented in public office, however. This article examines the role of women in politics from the decades prior to suffrage to the months leading up to the 2020 election and reminds us that although women have made tremendous strides, there is still a long way to go.

Michael Lewis’s The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds

The Undoing Project examines the relationship between two psychologists, Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, whose work altered how we understand the functioning of the mind. In this book, Lewis embarks on a journey to understand and explain psychological research to a popular audience. Lewis is an expert writer who knows what sells books. The Undoing Project is an informative, entertaining, and quick read. Lewis has produced a well-researched book that is accessible to a broad audience.

Gentrification and Racial Transformation in One Neighborhood in the City of Cincinnati during the Great Recession

This article examines the process of gentrification and racial transition in one neighborhood in Cincinnati between 2000 and 2016. Madisonville (Tract 55) was defined as a racially integrated middle-class neighborhood in the 1970s. In the early 2000s, substantial private and public investments in the neighborhood initiated the process of gentrification and an in-migration of wealthier (mostly white) residents. This revitalization of Madisonville coincided with the Great Recession of 2008 and with a massive exodus of the middle-class African American population. Median housing values and median rent in Madisonville increased significantly between 2010 and 2016, indicating that cost of living had become too expensive for a percentage of the population. In 2000, the white and African American population in Tract 55 had comparable median household incomes, but by 2016, white median household income was 3.5 times that of African Americans, suggesting that two separate and unequal housing markets had emerged. Using Google Street View and a gentrification index designed by Hwang (2015), this article undertakes documentation of the process of gentrification between 2009 and 2016 to visually support that gentrification occurred in the built environment after the Great Recession.