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This article demonstrates how the university back office can enable ambitious implementation partnerships between institutions of higher education and community-based organizations. It examines the Individual Development Account Collaborative of Louisiana, a $4 million asset-building program operated by the National Center for the Urban Community at Tulane and Xavier Universities, which produced more than six hundred graduates in less than two years, most of them first-time home owners. The bookkeeping and administrative requirements imposed by governmental granting agencies often tax the capacity of even the largest nonprofits, which lack the sponsored research infrastructure that the Cold War university has developed in consequence of processing hundreds of grants and contracts annually. Small nonprofits are best at delivering services to local communities; Research-1 universities are practiced at managing large grants and contracts. The article concludes that the administrative side of such university-community partnerships deserves as much attention as their programmatic side.

Contributions to election campaigns are tracked by the National Institute on Money in State Politics. In this paper, we use this data to examine patterns in political campaign contributions made by the insurance industry. We compile a state‐level data set that aggregates over 67,000 election campaign contributions to insurance regulators and governors; we show that candidate incumbency status is associated with a 20% to 30% increase in the share of contributions made to the incumbent insurance regulator's political party. Because incumbents are overwhelmingly favored to win elections, the industry's behavior suggests that insurers are more concerned with access to the elected official than with supporting a candidate that shares the industry's goals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We empirically estimate the effects of windstorm loss mitigation features on the value of coastal homes using fixed‐effects and spatial regression hedonic models. We use housing data from the "Fortified Home" program, which prescribes and certifies windstorm resilience features for residential property. We test the extent to which Fortified construction and the location of a house relative to the coast act as mitigation complements or substitutes. We find that on average homebuyers located at median distance to the coast pay a 6%–7% premium for Fortified homes, which exceeds the typical cost of building or retrofitting houses to the Fortified standard. Fortified construction and distance of the house from the coast are mitigation substitutes. The premium is highest for homes nearest the coast. Our findings are robust under various specifications of spatial hedonic models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A technique is developed for visually portraying the multidimensional-complex structure of perceptions of distributive justice within any society, based on theoretical assumptions of equity theory. This article outlines a spatial heuristic designed to facilitate cross-cultural exploration and comparison of the fairness maps people use in making contextual judgments about the relative contributions, rewards, and needs of perceived groups within their society. The technique is illustrated using plots of perceptual judgment data from a sample of 5,393 undergraduates, across 19 different cultural contexts. Variations in perceptions of fairness regarding different occupational groups, age categories, social classes, genders, and ethnic groups are explored. Judgments of fair and unfair and equitable and inequitable relationships are operationally defined, consistent with propositions of equity theory, and illustrative comparisons are made between the distributive equity patterns observed in several of the Cross-Cultural Variations in Distributive Justice Perception (CVDJP) cultural samples: Jamaica, Turkey, Estonia, and Taiwan. Keywords: culture; fairness; equity; justice; perception

This article outlines an alternative to traditional left-right ideological spectrum approaches to studying political opinion formation and distributive justice perception within cultures, highlighting instead the tension that exists between an interdependence distributive worldview focused on intimacy and social connectedness, and an independence distributive worldview focused on personal control and mastery over one's life space. Employing data from the Cross-Cultural Variations in Distributive Justice Perception project, (a) quantitative measures of individual differences in personality orientations and (b) qualitative-interpretive measures of word-use patterns (in discussing distributive fairness issues) are applied within two exemplary cultural contexts (Jamaica, New Zealand) to examine the potential utility of the interdependence-independence model as a viable explanatory alternative to left-right theories of justice orientation. Profiles are constructed of salient features differentiating the distributive worldviews of interdependents and independents in Jamaica and New Zealand, and implications of this model are drawn for the study of distributive justice perception processes across cultures. Keywords: ideology; justice; opinion; interdependence; independence; culture