My research interests include American state and local politics, urban finance, local power structures, and Congress. I am also interested in political methodology with an emphasis on spatial methods.
"Minding Your Neighborhood: The Spatial Context of Redistributive Spending" Presented at the MPSA Annual Conference in Chicago (April 2008)
Summary:
Objectives. Previous research on local redistribution has not accounted for spatial context. I develop a model of local Housing and Community Development (HCD) spending that includes measures of surrounding economic characteristics and neighboring policy decisions. Methods. I estimate a spatial 2SLS equation of own-source HCD spending that appropriately accounts for endogeneity between neighboring policy decisions and own policy decisions. The dataset spans the 48 contiguous states and utilizes data from the 2000 Census and the 1997 Census of Governments—Finance. Results. I find that neighboring policy choices and economic characteristics are significantly related to own-source HCD spending decisions. Conclusions. The nuances of geographic context are a critical determinant of local redistributive spending and statistical models that do not adequately account for these spatial contexts may be underspecified and biased.
Below is a map of own housing and community development spending for 1997 aggregated up to the county level. Additionally, you will find a bivariate Moran's Scatter Plot of own housing spending against neighboring total housing spending. The plot allows you to see the frequency and degree of spatial relationships in local housing redistribution. Those units in the upper left quadrants are low spenders surrounded by high spenders, the units in the upper right are high spenders surrounded by high spenders, the lower right is high spenders surrounded by low spenders, and the lower left is low spenders surrounded by low spenders. In Map 2 I map the results of the bivariate Moran's Scatter Plot.
