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Article 1: Moro, A. (2016). Distribution Dynamics of Property Crime Rates in the United States. Urban Studies, 54(11), 2613-2630.

Abstract: Using crime data for the 48 continental and conterminous US states and the distribution dynamics approach, this paper detects two distinct phases in the evolution of the property crime distribution: a period of strong convergence (1971–1980) is followed by a tendency towards divergence and bimodality (1981–2010). Moreover, the analysis reveals that differences in income per capita and police can explain the emergence of a bimodal shape in the distribution of property crime: in fact, after conditioning on these variables, the bimodality completely disappears. This empirical evidence is consistent with the predictions of a two-region model, that stresses the importance of income inequality in determining the dynamics of the property crime distribution.

Article 2: Cottrell, D., Herron, M. C., Rodriguez, J. M., & Smith, D. A. (2018). Mortality, Incarceration, and African American Disenfranchisement in the Contemporary United States, American Politics Research. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1177/1532673X18754555

Abstract: On account of poor living conditions, African Americans in the United States experience disproportionately high rates of mortality and incarceration compared with Whites. This has profoundly diminished the number of voting-eligible African Americans in the country, costing, as of 2010, approximately 3.9 million African American men and women the right to vote and amounting to a national African American disenfranchisement rate of 13.2%. Although many disenfranchised African Americans have been stripped of voting rights by laws targeting felons and ex-felons, the majority are literally “missing” from their communities due to premature death and incarceration. Leveraging variation in gender ratios across the United States, we show that missing African Americans are concentrated in the country’s Southeast and that African American disenfranchisement rates in some legislative districts lie between 20% and 40%. Despite the many successes of the Voting Rights Act and the civil rights movement, high levels of African American disenfranchisement remain a continuing feature of the American polity.