Political Mobilization in the Pews: Religious Contacting and Electoral Turnout

Objective . We probe the impact of voter contact by religious groups, in the form of direct attempts to encourage voters to vote in a certain way and the placement of voter guides in churches, on voter turnout among white evangelical Protestants, white mainline Protestants, white Roman Catholics, and black Protestants in 1994, 1996, and 1998. Methods . Using data from the 1994, 1996, and 1998 National Election Studies, we fit a series of logistic regression models of voter turnout that feature, as key predictors, variables indicating whether an individual was contacted by "any groups concerned with moral or religious issues that tried to encourage you to vote in a particular way" and whether "information about candidates, parties or political issues [was] made available in your place of worship before the election." Results . These forms of contact were most commonly experienced by white evangelicals and black Protestants, and in many instances such contacts accomplished their intended purpose. Conclusions . Interest group contacts—at least contacts from the types of groups examined here—have the potential to be no more effective than contacts by political parties, perhaps because their messages can be more narrowly targeted.     

Regional variation in the effect of structural factors on homicide in rural areas

A significant literature has evolved in the last 40 years investigating regional variation in lethal violence, with most studies focusing on Southern homicide rates. One question posed by this research involves the effect of structural conditions on violence in the context of a regional culture of violence. We take a unique approach to this problem by detailing two distinct conceptual processes, amplification and attenuation of structural influences on violence. We then investigate regional variations in the effects of resource deprivation on White homicide in rural areas—a context in which the Southern culture of violence should be most prominent. The results of our county-level analyses of census and homicide data around the year 2000 reveal that White homicide rates are higher in Confederate South states and that resource deprivation has a positive association with White homicide. The effect of resource deprivation also accounts for the Confederate South effect, and an interaction model indicates that the effect of this variable is significantly stronger in the non-South as predicted by the attenuation argument. Overall, these results suggest that both structural and cultural forces contribute to rural White homicide rates.     

Nonparametric Instrumental Variables Estimation of a Quantile Regression Model

We consider nonparametric estimation of a regression function that is identified by requiring a specified quantile of the regression “error” conditional on an instrumental variable to be zero. The resulting estimating equation is a nonlinear integral equation of the first kind, which generates an ill‐posed inverse problem. The integral operator and distribution of the instrumental variable are unknown and must be estimated nonparametrically. We show that the estimator is mean‐square consistent, derive its rate of convergence in probability, and give conditions under which this rate is optimal in a minimax sense. The results of Monte Carlo experiments show that the estimator behaves well in finite samples.     

Bayesian analysis of paired survival data using a bivariate exponential distribution

We consider a Bayesian analysis method of paired survival data using a bivariate exponential model proposed by Moran (1967, Biometrika 54:385–394). Important features of Moran’s model include that the marginal distributions are exponential and the range of the correlation coefficient is between 0 and 1. These contrast with the popular exponential model with gamma frailty. Despite these nice properties, statistical analysis with Moran’s model has been hampered by lack of a closed form likelihood function. In this paper, we introduce a latent variable to circumvent the difficulty in the Bayesian computation. We also consider a model checking procedure using the predictive Bayesian P-value.     

Revisiting the Dartmouth Court Decision: Why the US has Private Nonprofit Agencies Instead of Public Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs)

In 1819, the US Supreme Court ruled in Dartmouth v. Woodward that Dartmouth College, even though originally chartered by government, was legally akin to a private corporation. This landmark decision was the founding legal document of what has become the American private nonprofit sector. While the decision has attained hagiographic status, this paper explores what the US nonprofit sector would look like if the Supreme Court had ruled the other way. Using alternate history and scenario writing as research methodologies, it highlights the invisible losses due to the decision and depicts what a public nonprofit sector would have looked like.

The physician condition: the age of economic medicine

A university professor believes the combination of Generation X physicians, who assert different expectations about work and home-life compared to Baby Boomer physicians, and the influx of female physicians over the past three decades, has profound implications on the structure of the health care industry.     

Modeling Denomination Structures

Previous work on the denomination structure of currency treats as exogenous the distribution of transactions and the denominations held by people. Here, by way of a matching model, both are endogenous. In the model, trades in pairwise meetings alternate in time with the opportunity to freely choose a portfolio of denominations and there is a trade‐off between the benefits of small‐denomination money for transacting and the costliness of carrying a large quantity of small‐denomination money. For a given denomination structure, a monetary steady state is shown to exist. The model implies that too small denominations are abandoned.     

Children's Beliefs About Self‐disclosure to Friends Regarding Academic Achievement

Self‐disclosure to friends is a potentially useful way for children to pursue a range of desired goals. Here we examined reasoning about the appropriateness of disclosing one's own academic outcomes in a sample of 7‐, 9‐, 11‐, 13‐, and 15‐year‐old Chinese participants (N = 150). The valence of (1) the outcomes to be disclosed and (2) the corresponding outcomes for the potential audience for the disclosure was manipulated factorially, and participants judged whether disclosure was advisable and explained their responses. Disclosure was seen as more appropriate under valence‐matching conditions than valence‐mismatching conditions. How participants judged each type of disclosure under valence‐mismatching conditions varied as a function of participant age: As compared with younger participants, older participants considered disclosure of weak performance to a stronger performer more acceptable and disclosure of strong performance to a weaker performer less acceptable. These findings suggest that older children are more likely than younger children to appreciate that self‐disclosing positive performance outcomes can bring social costs, and that self‐disclosing negative performance outcomes can bring social benefits.     

Canonical Correlation Analysis Through Linear Modeling

In this paper, we introduce linear modeling of canonical correlation analysis, which estimates canonical direction matrices by minimising a quadratic objective function. The linear modeling results in a class of estimators of canonical direction matrices, and an optimal class is derived in the sense described herein. The optimal class guarantees several of the following desirable advantages: first, its estimates of canonical direction matrices are asymptotically efficient; second, its test statistic for determining the number of canonical covariates always has a chi‐squared distribution asymptotically; third, it is straight forward to construct tests for variable selection. The standard canonical correlation analysis and other existing methods turn out to be suboptimal members of the class. Finally, we study the role of canonical variates as a means of dimension reduction for predictors and responses in multivariate regression. Numerical studies and data analysis are presented.