Bias in Police Shootings: Is It Just An Opinion?

The claims of racism have drawn public attention toward police brutality and its impact on minorities. Is this just an opinion or is there any statistical evidence? Recent studies from The Atlantic have investigated the average age and ethnicity of victims from police killings in 2015-2016. As an Asian-American, I am motivated to examine the issue of police killings among races and other demographics to find any bias that is present. Using the dataset of 2,204 victims of police killings (2015-2016) collected by The Guardian, I will examine the following variables for bias: age, cause of death, armed/unarmed, race/ethnicity, and gender. My analyses will consider the following questions. Is the average age of the victims different from The Atlantic’s claim of 35 years old? Is the average age of a person killed by the police different for males versus females? Are younger victims more likely to be killed by a gun? Is the average age of the victims different for any ethnicity? Are minorities (Arab, Asian, Black, Hispanic, and Native American) more likely than Whites to be unarmed than armed? Do different ethnic groups or genders use the same weapons? Are females more likely to be unarmed than males? Considering race, is the less-lethal weapon of a Taser more likely to be used on one ethnic group than another? Similarly, is the lethal weapon of a gun more likely to be used on one ethnic group versus another? To investigate these questions, nonparametric and parametric hypothesis tests will be used with post hoc comparisons. Graphical displays, stratified boxplots, plots of confidence intervals, and correlation plots, will be used to display the findings. Answers to these questions allow the reader to decide if there is any bias in police killings and whether it’s just an opinion or statistically supported

Multi-faceted insights of entrepreneurship facing a fast-growing economy: A literature review

This study explores entrepreneurship research in Vietnam, a lower-middle-income country in Southeast Asia that has witnessed rapid economic growth since the 1990s but has nonetheless been absent in the relevant Western-centric literature. Using an exclusively developed software, the study presents a structured dataset on entrepreneurship research in Vietnam from 2008 to 2018, highlighting: low research output, low creativity level, inattention to entrepreneurship theories, and instead, a focus on practical business matters. The scholarship remains limited due to the detachment between the academic and entrepreneur communities. More important are the findings that Vietnamese research on entrepreneurship, still in its infancy, diverges significantly from those in developed and emerging economies in terms of their content and methods. These studies are contextualized to a large extent to reflect the concerns of a developing economy still burdened by the high financial and nonfinancial costs

Hanoi’s early 20th century: “On the second floor - Phố Phái”

And not just look; one needs to know where to look as well. In this case: look upwards, on the second floor of the old townhouses, which has not been replaced by showcasing pavilions or modern glass doors. Some houses have been repainted, but the architecture – the form of the story, the shapes, and construction of the balconies, the decorating sculptures – still exudes a century-old familiarity. So it turns out that Phố Phái, though no longer intact, is still present here

Essays on Industrial Organization and Environmental Economics

This dissertation consists of three essays on industrial organization and environmental economics. The first essay models the efficient pricing structure when consumers respond to average price rather than marginal price. Regulators have been using increasing block tariffs to regulate important markets such as water and electricity, although such tariffs are not shown to be efficient in the standard literature of industrial organization. In light of recent evidence regarding how consumers respond to complex price schedules, this essay re-examines the regulated non-linear pricing. Results show that increasing per-unit prices (hence increasing block tariffs) may be optimal when consumers respond to changes in average price rather than marginal price. This suggests the equity-efficiency trade-off associated with increasing block tariffs may be less severe than previously believed. The second and the third chapters study the garbage industry. In the United States, waste has been transported across county lines and state borders. Several states and counties have attempted to legalize transboundary waste flow controls in several Congress sessions after their ordinances were overturned by Supreme Court. Using data on intercounty waste flows in California and a random utility model of haulers' decisions about where to deposit waste from each county, the second essay studies the effects of not-in-my-backyard policies and fuel taxes on the spatial and demographic distribution of solid waste. I find that waste is currently more likely to be hauled to disposal facilities in communities with higher percentages of blacks and Hispanics, even after controlling for income, disposal fees, and transport distances. Counterfactual policy experiments show that policies that seek to limit waste flows would reduce intercounty waste transport. However, these policies tend to lead to substitution of waste away from facilities near white residents and toward facilities near Hispanic residents, potentially exacerbating distributional concerns. In the third chapter, I look at the residential mobility hypothesis to explain the uneven distribution of waste by demographics. Forming sound environmental justice policy involves understanding whether the correlation between race and environmental bads results from the disproportionate siting of locally unwanted land uses or nuisance-driven residential mobility. This essay presents evidence of residential sorting using a difference-in-difference strategy. Specifically, I compare changes in population after an opening (and closing) of a trash site between blocks within one mile to faraway blocks. Results show a 11 percent decrease in white population and a 44 percent increase in Hispanic population in a block after a trash site opened within one mile. Closing the site does not change white population immediately while inducing a 11 percent fall in Hispanic population, relative to the operating period

Improving Bayesian statistics understanding in the age of Big Data with the bayesvl R package

The exponential growth of social data both in volume and complexity has increasingly exposed many of the shortcomings of the conventional frequentist approach to statistics. The scientific community has called for careful usage of the approach and its inference. Meanwhile, the alternative method, Bayesian statistics, still faces considerable barriers toward a more widespread application. The bayesvl R package is an open program, designed for implementing Bayesian modeling and analysis using the Stan language’s no-U-turn (NUTS) sampler. The package combines the ability to construct Bayesian network models using directed acyclic graphs (DAGs), the Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) simulation technique, and the graphic capability of the ggplot2 package. As a result, it can improve the user experience and intuitive understanding when constructing and analyzing Bayesian network models. A case example is offered to illustrate the usefulness of the package for Big Data analytics and cognitive computing