Research

Published Research

From Zero to Hero?: Why Integrated Assessment Modeling of Negative Emissions Technologies Is Hard and How We Can Do Better

Authors: Jay Fuhrman, Haewon McJeon, Scott C. Doney, William Shobe, Andres F. Clarens

Efforts by the United Nations and others to develop a coordinated global response to climate change rely heavily on an ensemble of Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs) to make projections linking human activities to climate outcomes (IPCC, 20142018). IAMs are coupled models of the global economic and climate systems, first developed to represent fossil fuel emissions from the energy system (Reister and Edmonds, 1977), and later expanded to include land use change and forestry emissions, as well as non-CO2 emissions (Di Vittorio et al., 2014).

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Published Research

Does HUD Overpay for Voucher Units, and Will SAFMRs Reduce the Overpayment?

Authors: Edgar O. Olsen

One argument for Small Area Fair Market Rents (SAFMRs) is that they would reduce overpayment for voucher units in low-rent neighborhoods. This article provides a more comprehensive theoretical analysis that leads to the conclusion that the worst voucher units and those in the worst neighborhoods will usually rent for more than the mean market rent of identical units, and the best units in the best neighborhoods will rent for less than this amount.

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Working Paper

Racial Rent Differences in U.S. Housing Markets

Authors: Edgar O. Olsen, Paul E. Carrillo, Dirk W. Early

This paper exploits an unusually rich data set to estimate racial differences in the rents paid for identical housing in the same neighborhood in U.S. housing markets and how they vary with neighborhood racial composition. It overcomes the shortcomings of the data used in previous studies. Results suggest that households led by blacks pay more for identical housing in identical neighborhoods than their white counterparts and that this rent gap increases with the fraction of the neighborhood white.

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Working Paper

Keep the Kids Inside: Juvenile Curfews and Urban Gun Violence

Authors: Jennifer L. Doleac, Jillian B. Carr

Gun violence is an important problem across the United States. Due to limited data, it has been difficult to convincingly test the impacts of government policies on the quantity and geography of gunfire. This paper uses a new source of data on gunfire incidents, which does not suffer from selective underreporting common in other crime datasets, to measure the effects of juvenile curfews in Washington, DC.

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Working Paper

Spatial Models of Legislative Effectiveness

Authors: Craig Volden, Matthew P. Hitt, Alan E. Wiseman

Spatial models of policymaking have evolved from the median voter theorem through the inclusion of institutional considerations such as political parties, committees, and various voting and amendment rules. Such models, however, implicitly assume that no policy is more effective than another at solving public policy problems and that all proposers are equally capable of advancing proposals.

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