Robert VerBruggen

2 days ago | empiricalquestions.substack.com | Robert VerBruggen

A trio of academics have gotten tons of new data on police shootings—including nonfatal ones—by filing requests with cities across the country. They’ve published a book about it and, to their immense credit, made their data and code public. I’ll have a normal review of Deadly Force soon. But here, digging into the new dataset, I’ll take a skeptical look at some of their evidence of unjustifiable racial disparities. These points are too in the weeds for a general audience.

1 week ago | city-journal.org | Robert VerBruggen

Last month, as Republicans debated Medicaid reform, media outlets reported on a striking academic working paper. Authored by Angela Wyse of Dartmouth and Bruce Meyer of the University of Chicago, the study claimed that Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion saved thousands of low-income Americans’ lives. But last week, the Coalition for Evidence-Based Policy posted an assessment of the paper.

2 weeks ago | city-journal.org | Robert VerBruggen

The 1964 Civil Rights Act made it illegal to base employment decisions on protected characteristics, including sex and race. It doesn’t contain a carveout for “reverse” discrimination against majority groups—nor does it create special, extra-demanding legal standards for such cases. And yet courts in several of the nation’s appeals circuits have long made these cases harder to bring.

2 weeks ago | city-journal.org | Robert VerBruggen

Corporate America has unmistakably drifted leftward over the past decade, leaving behind a trail of racial-equity statements and climate promises. A lively new academic working paper, written by finance professors William M. Cassidy and Elisabeth Kempf and released through the National Bureau of Economic Research, quantifies the change based on tweets by S&P 500 companies—and explores both the causes and the consequences of this shift.

3 weeks ago | empiricalquestions.substack.com | Robert VerBruggen

American crime data are famously spotty, to the point that even national trends can change substantially as the FBI revises its estimates, which are based on numbers voluntarily submitted by police departments. But crime estimates at the county level, compiled by the ICPSR NACJD based on the same underlying data, are known by crime nerds to be particularly awful, to the point that leading crime-data expert Jacob Kaplan says not to use them.