1,720,957 research outputs found
VOTING WITH THEIR (LEFT AND RIGHT) FEET: DO PARTISANS VALUE NEIGHBORHOOD ENVIRONMENTAL AMENITIES DIFFERENTLY?
There exists a consistent partisan gap in preferences for public spending on the environment, with approval being 20 to 40 percentage points higher for Democrats than Republicans. In this paper, we investigate whether there is a similar partisan gap present in residential preferences for environmental amenities. We link housing data, land use, and household characteristics, including voter registration, for three distinct housing markets, and we develop a residential sorting model to estimate marginal willingness-to-pay (MWTP) for residential proximity to conserved land, allowing for preference heterogeneity by partisanship as well as other household characteristics. For all households combined, we estimate average annual household MWTP for locations proximate to open space to range from 1,061 across the three markets. In our model that allows for heterogeneous preferences across groups, we find no evidence that Republicans’ MWTP is less than Democrats’ MWTP, and we statistically reject the magnitude of preference disparity found in voting studies. These findings establish a difference in relative preferences across venues that has implications for valuation research and political economy. To assess why relative preferences may differ across venues, we develop a simple theoretical model that applies to both housing and voting decisions and incorporates parameters for parochial altruism and tax aversion. Using prior estimates on partisan differences in key parameters, we find both intuitive and, to some extent, numerical support for the observed difference in relative preferences
Does Land Conservation Financially Harm Renters?
Environmental public goods and hazards are unequally distributed, with minority and low-income communities faring far worse. While environmental improvements are likely to benefit disadvantaged groups, these improvements can increase the desirability of neighborhoods and increase housing prices. For homeowners, this yields a gain in equity but can negatively impact renters through increased housing costs. This paper seeks to evaluate how rental prices respond to gains in land conservation relative to owner-occupied home values using a panel of census and conservation data from the United States. We employ a first-difference regression model and use propensity score matching as a pre-processing method to improve the comparability of areas with and without new conservation. Overall, our results suggest that local gains in conservation do not capitalize into rental prices but do capitalize into home values. We pair these results with several robustness checks and alternative models, all of which support our primary findings
Voting with their (left and right) feet: Are homebuyers’ values of neighborhood environmental amenities consistent with their politics?
There exists a consistent partisan gap in preferences for public spending on the environment, with approval being 20 to 40 percentage points higher for Democrats than Republicans. In this paper, we investigate whether there is a similar partisan gap present in residential preferences for environmental amenities. We link housing data, land use, and household characteristics, including voter registration, for three distinct housing markets, and we develop a residential sorting model to estimate marginal willingness-to-pay (MWTP) for residential proximity to conserved land, allowing for preference heterogeneity by partisanship as well as other household characteristics. For all households combined, we estimate average annual household MWTP for locations proximate to open space to range from 1061 across the three markets. In our model that allows for heterogeneous preferences across groups, we find no evidence that Republicans\u27 MWTP is less than Democrats’ MWTP, and we statistically reject the magnitude of preference disparity found in voting studies. These findings establish a difference in relative preferences across venues that has implications for valuation research and political economy. To assess why relative preferences may differ across venues, we develop a simple theoretical model that applies to both housing and voting decisions and incorporates parameters for parochial altruism and tax aversion. Using prior estimates on partisan differences in key parameters, we find both intuitive and, to some extent, numerical support for the observed difference in relative preferences
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
The present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Whatever floats your vote: understanding voter support for public port infrastructure investments
Ports are a cornerstone of the local, state, and national economy, especially for coastal cities. However, ports face growing economic challenges that require infrastructure financing, and a relevant avenue of securing funds is through government assistance via bond issues. We examine voter support for the public financing of port infrastructure investments using a 2016 referendum in Rhode Island. Through our multiple regression voting model, we find strong evidence that public spending on ports in Rhode Island was more of a bipartisan issue compared to other public financing efforts on the ballot. Additionally, neighborhoods with a larger minority presence and those with higher median per capita income were more likely to support port development. In contrast, areas with a higher homeowner population and those communities farther from ports were less likely to support port spending. As a key novelty to our paper, we use our voting model results to forecast how a hypothetical port infrastructure bond might fare in other states, and find that regardless of socioeconomic and political differences, all coastal states in the US would be expected to pass a port referendum
Variations on the Author
“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
We provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Variation in Valuation: Open Space and Geography
We estimate hedonic valuation models of local open space separately for 215 cities in the Eastern US, and derive city-specific marginal willingness to pay (MWTP). We then examine variation in MWTP and city-level determinants. Valuation is largely local – relatively large changes in income or existing conservation lead to modest changes in MWTP – suggesting validity of benefit transfer across regions. However, geographic features that naturally limit development do correlate with MWTP. As a result, we examine geographic features as instrumental variables, and find that on average steep slope and water/wetlands yield valuation coefficients of opposite sign, consistent with a LATE interpretation
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
We conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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