Black-White Disparities in Care in Nursing Homes

Nursing homes serve many severely ill poor people, including large numbers of racial/ethnic minority residents. Previous research indicates that blacks tend to receive care from lower quality nursing homes. Using the Institute of Medicine (IOM) definition of racial-ethnic disparities, this study decomposes nursing home disparities into within and across facility components. Using detailed person-level nursing home data, we find meaningful black-white disparities for one of the four risk-adjusted quality measures, with both within and across nursing home components of the disparity. The IOM approach, which recognizes mediation through payer status and education, has a small effect on measured disparities in this setting. Although we did not find disparities across the majority of quality measures and alternate disparity definitions, this approach can be applied to other health care services in an effort to disentangle the role of across and within facility variation and the role of potential mediators on racial/ethnic disparities.     

Inter-group Disparities in the Distributional Analysis of Human Development: Concepts,Measurement, and Illustrative Applications

An important feature of most segmented societies is that deprivations and well-being achievements are unequally distributed across well-defined sub-groups of the population, when the latter is partitioned according to a variety of social or geographical categories, such as gender, caste, ethnicity, religion, occupation, sector of origin, or region of domicile. Group disparities are a matter of both instrumental interest in assessing the nature of a society (such as in terms of its propensity for conflict) and intrinsic concern in evaluations of a society’s record of ‘horizontal’ distributive justice. One aspect of a study of population heterogeneity would reside in the measurement of inter-group inequalities in the distribution of a society’s burdens and benefits. It is this aspect of the problem that is reviewed in the present paper. It is useful to note that group inequality can be categorized into different types (which are nevertheless mutually linked by certain commonalities of purpose and motivation), and a particularly instructive taxonomy is available in a recent paper by Arjun Jayadev and Sanjay Reddy (‘Inequalities and Identities’, which is available on the website of the Social Science Research Network, at ). The present paper also presents taxonomy of alternative approaches to reckoning group inequality, and discusses a number of real-valued measures of group disparity, mainly based on work in which this author has earlier engaged, by himself or in collaboration.     

Black-White Differences in Consumption: An Update and Some Policy Implications

Marcus Alexis, in his Ph. D. dissertation and in later published work, conducted pioneering work in the area of black-white differences in consumption behavior and thereby influenced our understanding of household behavior and significantly impacted the field of marketing. This paper recapitulates his findings and reviews some contemporary work on black-white differences in consumption and some implications for future work on differences in consumption behavior.     

Compositional Effects,Segregation and Test Scores: Evidence From the National Assessment of Educational Progress

A model of the effects of economic level and ethnicity on grade 8 mathematics scores both within and between schools found that both the economic composition and the ethnic composition of a school were directly related to the effectiveness of that school. Projection of the data suggests that if the nation's schools were completely desegregated economically (but not at all ethnically), the test-score gap between free lunch students and students paying full price for lunch would decline by 25 %. Ethnic compositional effects for black, Asian/Pacific Islander (API), and Hispanic students were reversed from their within-school effects, with positive effects for students in schools with larger proportions of black and Hispanic students and a strong negative effect for students in schools with larger proportions of Asian/Pacific Islander students.     

Black-White Inequality in Reading and Math Across K-12 Schooling: A Synthetic Cohort Perspective

While much has been written on the racial gap in achievement, few national studies have assessed the gap’s trajectory over K-12 schooling. The reason for this is understandable—most national data sets do not contain respondent information for this entire educational period. I utilize survey data from three national data sets containing White and Black students to document the trajectory of reading and math inequality between school entry and the end of high school. An attempt to clarify these observed patterns is made by assessing changes in the score distributions of these students across grade level, and examining how Black score distributions would fare if held to the White score distributions. Findings suggest that efforts to equalize achievement disparities must not only focus on “bringing the bottom up”, but also on keeping the top Black achievers on pace with the top White achievers across grade level.     

Spatial Disparities in Developing East Asia: a survey

Intra-country regional disparities and centre-region relations are important issues in developing East Asian countries. Most governments are experimenting with decentralisation initiatives, some of which are quite radical. There is disaffection towards centralised capital city control in several countries, most notably in Indonesia, where the possibility of further territorial fragmentation cannot be discounted. Rapid economic growth is inevitably uneven in its sub-national impacts. Some regions—usually those with better connections to the international economy—grow faster than others. In the wake of the 1997/98 economic crisis, fiscally constrained governments find it increasingly difficult to finance fiscal equalisation mechanisms and other measures designed to assist poor regions. Paradoxically, as international boundaries become increasingly porous and blurred, regional identities and aspirations are more sharply defined.     

Trade Liberalization in Thailand: Income Distributional Impact and Financing Problem*

The relationship between industrial protection and income distribution has been of considerable interest among economists. Although the literature generally focuses on the returns to primary factors of production as measures of income distribution, this paper attempts to clarify the relationship in terms of poverty and income inequality. Simulation results of a general equilibrium model based on Thai data show that a move toward free trade would lead to a more equal distribution of income. However, it would also lead to a government budget deficit. The way the government chooses to finance the deficit could have important consequences for income distribution and economic growth.     

Demographic Distributional Effect of High-Speed Railway: Evidence from Taiwan

Atlantic Economic Journal -     

Taxing Energy to Improve the Environment: Efficiency and Distributional Effects

We study the effects of environmental tax policy in a dynamic overlapping generations model of a small open economy with environmental quality incorporated as a durable consumption good. Raising the energy tax may yield an efficiency gain if agents care enough about the environment. The benefits are unevenly distributed across generations since capital ownership, and the capital loss induced by a tax increase, rises with age. A suitable egalitarian bond policy can be employed in order to ensure everybody gains to the same extent. With this additional instrument the optimal energy tax can be computed.     

Competitive Swimming and Racial Disparities in Drowning

This paper provides evidence of an inverse relationship between competitive swimming rates and drowning rates using Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) data on fatal drowning rates and membership rates from USA Swimming, the governing organization of competitive swimming in the United States. Tobit and Poisson regression models are estimated using panel data by state from 1999 to 2007 separately for males, females, African Americans and whites. The strong inverse relationship between competitive swimming rates and unintentional deaths through fatal drowning is most pronounced among African Americans males.     

中国城镇人口失业持续时间的性别差异

在过去的十几年里,中国的公有部门经历了大规模的所有制改革和失业。产业重组是经济转轨的必然要求,但这种改革对不同性别的影响不同。本文使用住户调查数据,分析重组后中国城镇人口失业持续时间的决定因素。在本文中,我们回答了以下两个问题:1)为什么女性的失业持续时间比男性长?2)失业持续时间的性别差异在多大程度上取决于劳动需求者和供给者的偏好和制度因素,在多大程度上取决于可观测的特征差异?本文的结果显示女性失业者实现再就业的概率低从而失业持续时间长,并且这种差距完全是由再就业的边际倾向决定(以估计的系数衡量)的,从而不能由宏观需求特征和性别间个体特征差异来解释。     

Beyond Disparate Impact: Risk-based Pricing and Disparity in Consumer Credit History Scores

Despite the increasing importance of credit scoring to an expanding range of activities, very little is known about the nature of the credit scoring process. This article examines the interaction of credit scoring with risk-based pricing, exploring the potential for credit scoring to contribute to the segmentation of low- and high-cost credit markets. Specifically, it uses a stylized example to illustrate the mechanism through which credit scores may capture disparities in surrounding credit markets, passing them into future periods and other credit markets. In the wake of mounting subprime foreclosures, this mechanism contains the potential to exacerbate the concentrated impacts of the subprime crisis in low-income and minority communities. The article examines this issue in the context of existing regulatory actions.     

Inpres and Inequality: A Distributional Perspective on the Centre's Regional Disbursements 1

Central government funding of local expenditures under the Inpres programs is a potentially important policy instrument for redressing regional inequalities in Indonesia. This paper examines the implicit distributional objectives underlying Inpres. The scheme is modelled as the outcome of a constrained social choice problem facing the centre. An econometric model of Inpres allocations is used to identify the centre's implicit social preferences over alternative regional distributions of consumption. Mild absolute-inequality aversion is revealed, although it is somewhat swamped by province-specific preference factors related to population size and density. No other local welfare indicators appear to influence Inpres allocations.     

中国市场转型中的区域经济差距:社会影响与政策调整

本文以四大区域和31个省区市为地域单元,分析了1978年以来中国区域经济差距的变动趋势。结果表明,四大区域间经济差距一直在趋于扩大,而省际差距大体以1990年为拐点呈"U"形变化。尤其是省际农村地区间差距,除1993~1998年外,都在趋于急剧扩大。这种区域经济差距的扩大态势,是与中国经济的市场转型紧密联系在一起的,它将对中国社会发展尤其是地方公共支出和公共服务、地区就业机会和失业率以及劳动力迁移等产生深刻的影响。为促进区域协调发展,今后一方面要更加强调公平目标,推动基本公共服务的均等化;另一方面要调整区域经济发展战略,由过去的"就资金移动劳动力"战略转变为"就劳动力移动资金"战略,引导沿海发达地区企业和资金向中西部转移,以在中西部地区创造更多的就业机会。     

中国区域经济差异的空间演化与政府调控

文章应用灰色关联度模型和Bootstrap方法估计了中国2002—2010年31个省市的经济差距状况,通过Bootstrap纠偏提高了小样本测试中数据分布的准确性。在此基础上,利用区域控制的Kernel密度分析方法对中国区域经济发展的分布演进和空间依赖性进行了分析。结果表明,中国区域经济分布演进存在俱乐部收敛趋势,且低收入俱乐部的规模远远大于其他较富裕的收敛俱乐部;中国的经济发展状况表现出空间上的非均衡性,且近邻效应显著,相应地区之间的经济水平趋于缩小。     

Overweight Adolescents and On-time High School Graduation: Racial and Gender Disparities

Obesity among U.S. adolescents ages 12–19 rose from 4.6% in 1963–1965 to 17.4% in 2003–2004. This paper contributes to the literature on the impact of unhealthy body mass index (BMI) on health (e.g., obesity) and human capital (e.g., schooling) investments of adolescents. We use the propensity score method to study 8,388 individuals who responded to survey Waves I through III of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health), for students in grades 7–12. We estimate an economic model that captures longer-term effects of BMI categories (obesity and overweight separately) on on-time (dichotomous) high school graduation. We control for characteristics at the individual, household, and community levels. Baseline probit regression estimates were improved upon by using matching estimators (propensity scores yield consistent estimate of the average treatment on the treated) based on the nearest neighbor and the more robust kernel density weighting schemes. Results from both full and reduced models suggest no adverse impact of overweight or obesity on timely high school completion for males, but a significant average negative effect on females. Investigating disparities in effects across both gender and race, we isolate the adverse effects primarily to white and Asian females. No significant effects were found for African-Americans. One of the novel contributions of our research is that the significant effects of gender- and race- specific adolescent obesity and overweight conditions reach beyond high school GPA standing to also impact on-time high school graduation status.     

The Neoliberal Framework of EU Urban Policy in Action: Supporting Competitiveness and Reaping Disparities

This paper concerns the gradual proliferation of the neoliberal rationale in European Union urban policies towards a specific mode of competitiveness-oriented 'policy networking'. Empirical research on the policy network of the EU URBAN Initiative in Portugal and Greece illustrates the ineffectiveness of the current approach in acknowledging the socio-economic and political specificities that influence development prospects in lagging cities. The Commission's proposals on the reform of the Funds (2007-13) suggest the incorporation of EU urban programmes in the mainstream spatial policies framework. The rationale, however, remains unchanged. The context-free emphasis put in these proposals on the 'competitiveness' target mitigates the 'cohesion' objective and risks perpetuating uneven urban development trends.