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Dear Price community and friends,
Over this summer and early fall, there has been much exciting research output, including over 35 contracts and grant submissions. Below are just a few highlights of the impactful work our faculty are doing. Please click the link below to view the full research newsletter.
Sincerely,
Alice Chen
Vice Dean for Research
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Publications:
Electoral Innovation and the Alaska System: Partisanship and Populism Are Associated with Support for Top-4 Ranked-Choice Voting Rules
Advancing Democracy Through Law
What they researched: Christian Grose and co-authors examined whether a non-partisan, top-4 primary followed by a ranked-choice general election in Alaska in 2020 favored more moderate candidates.
What they found:
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The moderate Republican Senate candidate, Lisa Murkowski, likely would have lost a closed partisan primary;
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Some Democrats and independents favored the moderate Republican over the candidate of their own party, and the new rules allowed them to support her at all stages of the election, along with others who voted for her to stop the more conservative Republican candidate; and
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Alaskan voters are largely favorable toward the new rules, but certain kinds of populist voters are likely to both support Trump and oppose the rules.
Why it matters: The initial use of Alaska’s procedure in 2022 serves as a test case for examining whether such reforms may help moderates prevail in primaries over more extreme candidates.
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Estimating Disenfranchisement in US Elections, 1870–1970
Perspectives on Politics
What they researched: Jeffery Jenkins and his colleague examined to what degree legal and constitutional provisions enacted in the late 19th century through the mid 20th century disenfranchised Black voters.
What they found: The poll tax was the main driver of disenfranchisement in Southern elections, with literacy tests and secret ballots, aka Australian ballots, providing some secondary effects. Additionally, ex-felon disenfranchisement laws were considerably more important—both in reducing turnout as well as Republican vote share in Southern elections—than has been traditionally understood. Southern efforts at voter disenfranchisement through formal policies, unsurprisingly, helped to maintain white supremacy.
Why it matters: The results show the powerful effects of disenfranchising policies on electorates and electoral outcomes.
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How To Advance the Debate Over QALYs: A Response to Kaplan et al.
Health Affairs
What they researched: Jason Doctor and Darius Lakdawalla argued for approaches to allocating healthcare that are closely tied to economic theory.
What they found: Their research showed that greater equity in healthcare is possible when a Generalized Risk-Adjusted Cost-Effectiveness (GRACE) model is used, because it recognizes the possibility that sicker patients place greater value on a given health improvement than a healthy person. People in good health benefit less from an additional unit of health than do people poor in health. This means there are “diminishing returns” on health the healthier a person gets. This contrasts with standard cost-effectiveness analysis, which implies that sick and healthy people derive equal value from health gains. Doctor and Lakdawalla also argued that preferences for health due to disability may be independent of those for treatable conditions. This implies that the value of an additional year of life is equally valuable if a person has a disability or if they are able-bodied.
Why it matters: By recognizing the importance of diminishing returns, GRACE mitigates discrimination against sick and disabled persons. Most importantly, when empirically realistic preferences for health are used, GRACE eliminates disability discrimination entirely.
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The U-Shaped Charitable-Giving Curve
Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly
What they researched: Nicolas Duquette and a co-author looked at whether high- and low-income households donate a larger share of their income than the middle class -- the U-Shaped Giving Curve. Decades of correlational studies have found that the share of income given to charity follows a U-shape pattern in the US, but scholars continue to debate whether the apparent U-shape is a statistical mirage, or accurately characterizes giving across the income distribution.
What they found: The study experimentally verified that random placement in an income distribution causes a U-shaped giving-income curve. The U-shape observed in real-world data, therefore, is plausibly, not spurious, but a real effect of relative economic status on giving decisions.
Why it matters: With all other explanations of the U-curve either excluded by the study’s lab setup or equalized by randomization, the only plausible inference is that one’s relative income does influence generosity in giving, with high- and low-income households donating a larger share of their income than the middle class.
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Access to the exclusive city: Home sharing as an affordable housing strategy
Urban Studies
What they researched: Geoff Boeing and a co-author studied whether sharing housing creates opportunities for home seekers in unaffordable markets by analyzing online rental listings in Los Angeles.
What they found: Rooms for rent are significantly less expensive than small apartments, on average. They are therefore more attainable for one-person households from a variety of incomes and offer more affordable accommodation than traditional, small apartment listings. Second, there are more listings for rooms for rent than for small apartments, and they in turn represent an important affordability option for accessing housing in a wide range of neighborhoods in unaffordable cities and exclusive local submarkets.
Why it matters: If home sharing offers an affordability strategy, then a better understanding of its locations and costs is crucial in the present era of housing crises and planners’ search for solutions.
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Tieboutian clubs revisited
The Annals of Regional Science
What they researched: Eric Heikkila , together with Ph.D. candidate Jody Coutin, examined the evolution of Tieboutian clubs over time and across metropolitan regions in the U.S. Tieboutian clubs are a theoretical concept that describes how households choose to live in local jurisdictions based on their preferences for local public goods, fiscal considerations and neighborhood attributes.
What they found: Among other outcomes, the paper found that, with very few exceptions, households with similar attributes have a strong tendency to be co-located within the same census tracts, and those census tracts, in turn, tend to be co-located with reference to municipal boundaries. Four prominent sorting criteria are economic status, ethnicity, age, and immigration status.
Why it matters: If municipalities matter in this context, it is reasonable to expect that municipal management also matters. Decades of research geared to the original Tiebout sorting mechanism has focused primarily on the local public finance and land economy dimensions. The results presented in this study suggest that there is ample scope for broadening that focus to address other club characteristics more systematically.
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Presentations:
Geoff Boeing gave the keynote address at the induction ceremony of the Nu Theta chapter of Gamma Theta Upsilon, the international geographical honor society.
Adam Rose presented the paper “Economy-wide Consequences of Widespread, Long Duration Electric Power Interruptions” (co-authored with Ian Sue Wing, Peter Larsen, Dan Wei, and others), at the Global Trade Analysis Project (GTAP) Annual Meeting, June 5, 2024.
William Resh presented his paper “Complementarity, Vulnerability, and Replacement: Artificial Intelligence in the United States Federal Labor Market" at the Wharton School of Business's AI and the Future of Work conference (Philadelphia, May 23-24, 2024).
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Of Note:
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Jason Doctor and Daniella Meeker have been awarded a $5.6M National Institute on Aging 5-year grant renewal for the USC-Yale Roybal Center for Behavioral Interventions in Aging.
Adam Rose received the USC Graduate Policy and Administration Community Lifetime Achievement in Public Policy Award, May 2024.
William Resh signed a multiple edition book contract with SAGE Press to coauthor the textbook The Politics of the Administrative Process with Don Kettl.
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This email is brought to you by the USC Price Office of Research, Office of the Dean
and Office of Communication. For more information please contact Megan Narvaez, Administrative Assistant, at megannar@usc.edu.
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USC Sol Price School of Public Policy
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