Abstract
Philip N. Jefferson
This lecture, an NEA Presidential Address, presents an overview of stylized facts about poverty. These facts support the assertion that currently we do not know why the long run trend in poverty has been negative. Furthermore, this lack of understanding is a major impediment to our ability to prescribe policies for poverty reduction in the future. The analysis presents a specific challenge to researchers concerned about poverty reduction and articulates a metric for telling when, from an empirical viewpoint, that challenge has been met (JEL: 132, E32, C22).
Philip N. Jefferson is a professor of economics at Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, PA 19081.
Kwabena Gyimah-Brempong
This paper investigates whether the crime effects of alcohol availability is the same in low and high income neighborhoods. Using census tract data and instrumental variables estimation, the author finds that the crime effect of alcohol availability in low income neighborhoods is significantly higher than in high income neighborhoods. At the mean of other variables, the elasticity of total crime with respect to alcohol availability in low income neighborhoods in my sample is 0.908 while the elasticity is 0.295 in high income neighborhoods. Similar differential crime elasticities are calculated for different indices of crime. This differential crime effect can be explained by the political economy of alcohol outlet location that leads to the over concentration of alcohol outlets in low income neighborhoods while leading to under concentration of alcohol outlets in high income neighborhoods as well as differences in the types of alcohol licenses in the two types of neighborhoods. The results of this paper has interesting research and alcohol control policy implications; dispersing alcohol outlets more evenly throughout city neighborhoods instead of concentrating them in poor neighborhoods could decrease aggregate crime rates (JEL: K4, D62).
Kwabena Gyimah-Brempong is a professor of economics at the University of South Florida, Tampa, FL 33620.
Augustin Kwasi Fosu
This paper critiques a productivity ranking of black economists presented in The Review of Black Political Economy, Vol. 30, No. 2, Fall 2002, by Jacqueline Agesa, Maury Granger and Gregory N. Price. It argues that the Agesa et al. ranking is a reputational ranking rather than a productivity ranking and suggests an adjustment to account for co-authorship (JEL: A11, J44, Z00).
Augustin Kwasi Fosu is Senior Policy Advisor/Chief Economist, UN Economic Commission for Africa, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia (e-mail:
Jacqueline Agesa, Maury Granger, and Gregory N. Price
In The Review of Black Political Economy, Vol. 30, No. 2, Fall 2002, we provided rankings of black economist research productivity based on research output measures that did not adjust for co-authorship. Augustin Kwasi Fosu critiques these rankings arguing—in our view correctly—that failure to adjust for co-authorship could impart a bias to the measured research output of individuals as co-authorship can engender unobserved cross-effort productivity effects. In this article, we reproduce our original rankings with adjustments for co-authorship. We find that while adjusting for co-authorship does have a statistically significant effect on the ranking distribution, it has no practical effect on how black economists are ranked according to research productivity. Our results suggest that at least for black economists who are high performers with respect to publishing in refereed economics journals, unobserved cross-effort productivity effects associated with co-authorship do not appear to have any practical significance for research productivity rankings (JEL: A11, J44, Z00).
Jacqueline Agesa is Associate Professor, Division of Finance and Economics, Marshall University, Huntington, WV 25755. Maury Granger is Associate Professor of Economics, and Chairperson Department of Economics, Finance and General Business, Jackson State University, Jackson, MS, 39217 and Gregory N. Price is Director, Mississippi Urban Research Center, Jackson Mississippi; Professor of Economics, Department of Economics, Jackson State University, Jackson, MS 39217.