Heather E. Campbell

Aviation Noise and Environmental Justice: The Barrio Barrier

Aviation noise is a harmful pollutant, which has yet to be studied in the environmental justice literature. This paper uses Tobit and logit multivariate regression analyses to analyze noise pollution exposure from a major commercial-service airport. It addresses the issue of whether people moved to the aviation noise-impacted areas or the noise encroached on the people, and controls for economic and political costs as well as the possibility of racial and ethnic prejudice. The results indicate that ethnicity is the primary cause of the disproportionate burden of aviation noise pollution borne by Hispanics in the area analyzed.

Evaluating Teaching: Listening to Students while Acknowledging Bias.

Despite questions about their reliability and validity, student evaluations of teaching (SETs) are a primary measure of instructor performance. The current study examines SETs, including a thorough list of potentially relevant variables. The findings suggest that how much students perceive they learned in a course is an important predictor of SET scores. Further, a number of variables outside of the instructors control appear to introduce bias into SETs. Nonetheless, social work norms imply the necessity of seeking input from students. Suggestions are given for possible methods of dealing with this dilemma, and for needed future research.

Providing Refuge: The Value of Domestic Violence Shelter Services

This study is a social cost-benefit analysis of domestic violence shelter services. In conducting the analysis, the authors distinguish between short-term and longer-term program costs and benefits. They obtained estimates of several of the short-term costs and benefits and used these figures for their quantitative analysis. They then discuss the potential longer-term costs and benefits of shelter programs but do not monetize these effects. The costs of domestic violence shelter services include operating expenses and public assistance for women and children. The benefits of the domestic violence shelter services include assaults averted and mental health benefits. The authors find that domestic violence shelter services have social benefits that significantly outweigh the social costs. The minimum net social benefit of the domestic violence shelter program is

The politics of requesting: Strategic behavior and public utility regulation

3,494,934 and the minimum benefit-cost ratio is 4:6.

Student Evaluations of Teaching: How You Teach and Who You Are

Extant models of public utility regulation assume that regulated firms make the same rate adjustment requests regardless of the political environment they will face during the rate case. Focusing on information asymmetries, the repeated interaction between the firm and the regulatory commission, and behavioral assumptions about the goals of regulators, a new model is proposed that assumes firms strategically and rationally plan their requests to respond to political and agency, as well as standard economic factors. An implication of the new model is that the effect of political factors, such as grassroots advocacy and regulator election, should be observed in request equations rather than in award equations where they are traditionally sought. This new model is tested using data from 54 telephone rate cases. The results indicate that firms do respond strategically to political factors (especially to regulator elections), and also to agency factors (such as workload), by increasing their requests. This partially explains a puzzling result in the literature and has implications for regulatory policy, interest group behavior, democratic institutions, and public management.

Helping those like us or harming those unlike us: Illuminating social processes leading to environmental injustice

Abstract Student evaluations of teaching (SETs) have become an important measure of the quality of teaching in higher education institutions in the United States. Some research indicates that SETs may be systematically biased; however, most studies of SETs do not include much measure of instructional choices teachers make.This study includes most variables the SET literature identifies as important and also adds measures of teacher choices, such as whether to use instructional technologies and what percent of time to spend lecturing.The results provide some useful information about how better to connect with students but also indicate that SETs are systematically biased against female teachers, older teachers, and perhaps minority teachers.These findings call into question de facto higher education policy making SETs our most important measure of teaching quality.

Local Zoning and Environmental Justice: An Agent-Based Model Analysis

Several theories have been proposed to explain societal environmental injustices. Studies based on standard statistical methods and empirical data are often limited in testing some of these theories. This is especially true when some potential reasons (eg, racism) for unjust environmental outcomes are invidious, and even individual-level methods (eg, surveys) are unlikely to be effective in detecting them. We use agent-based modeling to explore the circumstances under which racially defined environmental injustice occurs in a society. We test three competing theories of an environmental disamenitys location decision: cost factors alone, benign intention for the majority population, or malign intention for the minority population, along with three scenarios of residential similarity preferences. The simulation demonstrates that a purely neoclassical world—one in which firms and residents care only about costs—does not lead to environmental injustice. Nor does a similar world in which disamenity-producing firms seek to locate away from majority residents. Instead, two conditions led to societal environmental injustice: when disamenity-producing firms aim to locate near minorities or when residents prefer to live near other residents like themselves. In our model, a race-conscious society rather than just a collection of race-conscious firms produced significant levels of environmental injustice.

Teaching Program Evaluation to Public Administration Students in a Single Course: An Experiential Solution

This article presents an agent-based computational analysis of the effects of externality zoning on environmental justice (EJ). We experiment with two ideal types of externality zoning: proactive and reactive. In the absence of zoning, environmental injustice emerges and minority agents have lower average environmental quality than majority agents. With proactive zoning, which allows polluting firms only in designated zones, EJ problems are less severe and appear more tractable. With reactive zoning, which creates buffering zones around polluting firms, environmental injustice tends to emerge more quickly as compared with proactive zoning but tends to decline over time. This analysis examines a possible policy tool available for cities to ameliorate environmental injustice.

USING BAYESIAN METHODS TO CONTROL FOR SPATIAL AUTOCORRELATION IN ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE RESEARCH: AN ILLUSTRATION USING TOXICS RELEASE INVENTORY DATA FOR A SUNBELT COUNTY

Although program evaluation can be a key skill of public management, most MPA programs can offer only a single course in it. The literature regarding program evaluation training stresses that good ...

A Comparative Framework for Analyzing Urban Environmental Policy

ABSTRACT: Many previous environmental justice (EJ) studies have argued that there is disproportionate collocation of environmental disamenities with racial and ethnic minorities, even holding constant other factors such as income and political action. However, most of the EJ studies do not account for the presence of spatial autocorrelation, especially those that also include nonnormal distributions. Using the location of new Toxics Release Inventory facilities (TRIFs) in Maricopa County, Arizona in the 1990s, we illustrate a finding of spatial autocorrelation and the use of Bayesian spatial models to accommodate the issue. The results show that the relationship between Asian minority status in a census tract and new TRIF establishments found with regression models does not remain statistically significant once spatial autocorrelation is accounted for. Instead, three variables, the percentage of American Indians in the tract, population density, and the percentage of residents aged 55–74, statistically significantly explained new TRIF establishments. This illustrates that failure to control for spatial autocorrelation can lead to incorrect policy understanding.