Brooks Depro

Rethinking sports-based community crime prevention: a preliminary analysis of the relationship between midnight basketball and urban crime rates.

The authors conducted a preliminary empirical test of the claim—dismissed by most scholars—that midnight basketball programs lower city-level crime rates. Results show cities that were early adopters of officially sanctioned midnight basketball leagues experienced sharper decreases in property crime rates than other American cities during a period in which there was broad support for midnight basketball programs. Although likely associated with a variety of confounding factors, these rather-surprising results suggest the need to reevaluate the deterrent effects of popular sports- and recreation-based prevention programs with a new emphasis on more diffuse, indirect mechanisms such as positive publicity and community trust. Further substantiation and refinement of these ideas could significantly reshape how these popular and wellestablished initiatives are implemented and evaluated.

Climate Change and Conservation in Brazil: CGE Evaluation of Health and Wealth Impacts

Abstract Ecosystem services are public goods that frequently constitute the only source of capital for the poor, who lack political voice. As a result, provision of ecosystem services is sub-optimal and estimation of their values is complicated. We examine how econometric estimation can feed computable general equilibrium (CGE) modeling to estimate health-related ecosystem values. Against a back drop of climate change, we analyze the Brazilian policy to expand National Forests (FLONAS) by 50 million hectares. Because these major environmental changes can generate spillovers in other sectors, we develop and use a CGE model that focuses on land and labor markets. Compared to climate change and deforestation in the baseline, the FLONAS scenario suggests relatively small declines in GDP, output (including agriculture) and other macro indicators. Urban households will experience declines in their welfare because they own most of the capital and land, which allows them to capture most of the deforestation benefits. In contrast, even though rural households have fewer opportunities for subsistence agriculture and face additional competition with other rural agricultural workers for more limited employment, their welfare improves due to health benefits from conservation of nearby forests. The efficiency vs. equity tradeoffs implied by the FLONAS scenario suggests that health-related ecosystem services will be underprovided if the rural poor are politically weaker than the urban rich. In conclusion, we briefly discuss the pros and cons of the CGE strategy for valuing ecosystem-mediated health benefits and evaluating contemporary policies on climate change mitigation.

White Flight and Coming to the Nuisance: Can Residential Mobility Explain Environmental Injustice?

Effective environmental justice (EJ) policy requires an understanding of the economic and social forces that determine the correlation between race, income, and pollution exposure. We show how the traditional approach used in many EJ analyses cannot identify nuisance-driven residential mobility. We develop an alternative strategy that overcomes this problem and implement it using data on air toxics from Los Angeles County, California, USA. Differences in estimated willingness to pay for cleaner air across race groups support the residential mobility explanation. Our results suggest that Hispanics may dislike cancer risk but be less willing to trade other forms of consumption to avoid it. As a result, household mobility responses may work against policies designed to address inequitable siting decisions for facilities with environmental health risks.

Disconnected Geography: A Spatial Analysis of Disconnected Youth in the United States

Since the Great Recession, US policy and advocacy groups have sought to better understand its effect on a group of especially vulnerable young adults who are not enrolled in school or training programs and not participating in the labor market, so called ‘disconnected youth.’ This article distinguishes between disconnected youth and unemployed youth and examines the spatial clustering of these two groups across counties in the US. The focus is to ascertain whether there are differences in underlying contextual factors among groups of counties that are mutually exclusive and spatially disparate (non-adjacent), comprising two types of spatial clusters – high rates of disconnected youth and high rates of unemployed youth. Using restricted, household-level census data inside the Census Research Data Center (RDC) under special permission by the US Census Bureau, we were able to define these two groups using detailed household questionnaires that are not available to researchers outside the RDC. The geospatial patterns in the two types of clusters suggest that places with high concentrations of disconnected youth are distinctly different in terms of underlying characteristics from places with high concentrations of unemployed youth. These differences include, among other things, arrests for synthetic drug production, enclaves of poor in rural areas, persistent poverty in areas, educational attainment in the populace, children in poverty, persons without health insurance, the social capital index, and elders who receive disability benefits. This article provides some preliminary evidence regarding the social forces underlying the two types of observed geospatial clusters and discusses how they differ.