Inequality and welfare evaluation of heterogeneous income distributions

This paper establishes the principles that should govern the welfare and inequality analysis of heterogeneous income distributions. Two basic criteria – the equity preference condition and the compensation principle – are shown to be fundamentally incompatible. The paper favours the latter, thereby vindicating the traditional method of dealing with heterogeneous samples. However, inequality and welfare comparisons will usually be well defined only if equivalent incomes are obtained using constant scale factors; and researchers will need to distinguish clearly between inequality of nominal incomes and inequality of living standards. Furthermore, household observations must always be weighted according to family size.     

The "experimenting agency". The California Youth Authority Research Division

During the 1960s and 1970s, the California Youth Authority embarked on a series of randomized field trials to test interventions for juvenile and young adult offenders. This article examines the institutional and political reasons why rigorous tests were adopted for such interventions as the Community Treatment Program. It also describes the effect these trials had on the agency and on California justice, as well as how the experimental method eventually became less often used in the Youth Authority. The authors explore some general reasons why this happened.     

School dropout and injecting drug use in a national sample of white non-Hispanic American adults

In this study we sought to extend our previous finding of an association between school dropout and injecting drug use (IDU) among African Americans by testing the association in a sample of White non-Hispanic Americans. A nationally representative sample of White non-Hispanic Americans age eighteen years and older was drawn from public use data files of the 1995-1996 National Household Surveys on Drug Abuse (NHSDA). Adults with a self-report history of IDU were identified, and were matched to non-IDU adults in the same neighborhoods of residence. Conditional logistic regression was used to estimate the association between dropping out of high school and the occurrence of IDU. White non-Hispanic American high school dropouts were more likely than high school graduates to have injected a drug at least once. The findings of this research on non-Hispanic Whites are generally consistent with our earlier evidence on the association between educational status and a history of IDU among African-American adults. School dropout prevention programs may merit attention in an overall strategy of preventing injecting drug use and HIV/AIDS.     

Estimating Individual-Level Risk in Spatial Epidemiology Using Spatially Aggregated Information on the Population at Risk

We propose a novel alternative to case-control sampling for the estimation of individual-level risk in spatial epidemiology. Our approach uses weighted estimating equations to estimate regression parameters in the intensity function of an inhomogeneous spatial point process, when information on risk-factors is available at the individual level for cases, but only at a spatially aggregated level for the population at risk. We develop data-driven methods to select the weights used in the estimating equations and show through simulation that the choice of weights can have a major impact on efficiency of estimation. We develop a formal test to detect non-Poisson behavior in the underlying point process and assess the performance of the test using simulations of Poisson and Poisson cluster point processes. We apply our methods to data on the spatial distribution of childhood meningococcal disease cases in Merseyside, U.K. between 1981 and 2007.     

Solidarity.com? Class and collective action

conclusion In detailing the evolution of the economic landscape from factory town to electronic vil-lage and in discussing how class and collective action may be analyzed in the context of the electronic village, my goal has been to provide a framework that researchers can use to develop meaningful studies of class and collective action in the electronic village.