1. Roland Fryer.
This paper explores racial differences in police use of force. On non-lethal uses of force, blacks and Hispanics are more than fifty percent more likely to experience some form of force in interactions with police. Adding controls that account for important context and civilian behavior reduces, but cannot fully explain, these disparities. On the most extreme use of force – officer-involved shootings – we find no racial differences in either the raw data or when contextual factors are taken into account. We argue that the patterns in the data are consistent with a model in which police officers are utility maximizers, a fraction of which have a preference for discrimination, who incur relatively high expected costs of officer-involved shootings.
2. Emi Nakamura, Jósef Sigurdsson, Jón Steinsson.
We exploit a volcanic “experiment” to study the costs and benefits of geographic mobility. We show that moving costs (broadly defined) are very large and labor therefore does not flow to locations where it earns the highest returns. In our experiment, a third of the houses in a town were covered by lava. People living in these houses where much more likely to move away permanently. For those younger than 25 years old who were induced to move, the “lava shock” dramatically raised lifetime earnings and education. Yet, the benefits of moving were very unequally distributed within the family: Those older than 25 (the parents) were made slightly worse off by the shock. The town affected by our volcanic experiment was (and is) a relatively high income town. We interpret our findings as evidence of the importance of comparative advantage: the gains to moving may be very large for those badly matched to the location they happened to be born in, even if differences in average income are small.
3. Ran Abramitzky, Leah Platt Boustan, Katherine Eriksson.
Using two million census records, we document cultural assimilation during the Age of Mass Migration, a formative period in US history. Immigrants chose less foreign names for children as they spent more time in the US, eventually closing half of the gap with natives. Many immigrants also intermarried and learned English. Name-based assimilation was similar by literacy status, and faster for immigrants who were more culturally distant from natives. Cultural assimilation affected the next generation. Within households, brothers with more foreign names completed fewer years of schooling, faced higher unemployment, earned less and were more likely to marry foreign-born spouses.
1. How do you know you added enough controls?
Roland Fryer study really should be nationwide so we can better analyze if minorities are shot or harmed more often by police. I am amazed these numbers aren’t tabulated and would go a long way for the emotional protests. It does show Houston police were less likely to shoot an African-American than a white person although Houston police did consistently show more aggressive measures with African-Americans. My guess is African-Americans are better behaved than whites during stops although the shooting was not proven to statistically different.
Additionally, it would be worthwhile to measure the police force by stops and by population. I suspect that African-Americans are stopped significantly at higher rates (3x if memory) so African-Americans still face the issue more often.
“My guess is African-Americans are better behaved than whites during stops”
In Houston? My guess is that they are worse, probably partly because they get stopped so often. Most of these shootings and videos I can’t imagine anyone doing what they do. Go watch the video of the mom with a van full of kids (address below). It is anecdote, but how does that happen one time? Something crazy is going on. I don’t know if it is blacks believe cops are out to kill them which induces them to act in ways that induces cops to kill them or what.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yJU3GhyF4e4
Well actually we don’t know here although the study did show a statistically insignificant lower percentage for African-Americans shooting than white. In reality, the data set was not large enough (and all Houston) to draw many conclusions from. Given the author probably had a different hypothesis, it is important to still publish the data and give us a better understanding the reality and ideas for further research. Anecdotely, I listened to an African-American Christian talk show and they were discussing strategies on how to handle a police stop. (Get a friend and witness nearby was the favorite.)
Again, the main appreciation is with data we can manage the emotional debates better.
No emotional debate from me.
I’ve watched lots of those talks because I assume it us important to know how to do things. It is odd that and probably counterproductive that they have seminars assuming it is all the cops faul and that cops are out to get them.
2. “In our experiment, a third of the houses in a town were covered by lava. People living in these houses where much more likely to move away permanently.”
The IRB for that one must have been a mother.