Supermassive Black Holes in Active Galactic Nuclei

This article gives a brief overview of the direct and indirect evidence in support of the standard paradigm that active galactic nuclei are powered by supermassive black holes.Comment: A review to appear in The Encyclopedia of Astronomy and Astrophysics (Institute of Physics Publishing). TeX, 13 pages, including embedded figure

Financing Direct Democracy: Revisiting the Research on Campaign Spending and Citizen Initiatives

The conventional view in the direct democracy literature is that spending against a measure is more effective than spending in favor of a measure, but the empirical results underlying this conclusion have been questioned by recent research. We argue that the conventional finding is driven by the endogenous nature of campaign spending: initiative proponents spend more when their ballot measure is likely to fail. We address this endogeneity by using an instrumental variables approach to analyze a comprehensive dataset of ballot propositions in California from 1976 to 2004. We find that both support and opposition spending on citizen initiatives have strong, statistically significant, and countervailing effects. We confirm this finding by looking at time series data from early polling on a subset of these measures. Both analyses show that spending in favor of citizen initiatives substantially increases their chances of passage, just as opposition spending decreases this likelihood

Racial Disparities and Similarities in Post-Release Recidivism and Employment Among Ex-prisoners with a Different Level of Education

Previous studies rarely examined racial disparities in post-release employment and recidivism. Finding a job is an immediate challenge to all released ex-prisoners, and often more difficult for African American ex-prisoners who typically return to economically-depressed neighborhoods upon release from prison. The present researchers conducted a 5-year (2005-2009) follow-up study in an attempt to understand racial disparities in post-release employment and recidivism among 6,394 released ex-prisoners (2,531 Caucasian and 3,863 African American), while controlling for the ex-prisoner’s level of education. Results of this study showed that African American ex-prisoners had a higher unemployment rate and recidivism rate than Caucasian ex-prisoners. This study also revealed that released ex-prisoners, if employed, would likely be under-employed and experience difficulties in sustaining employment, regardless of the ex-prisoner’s ethnicity. Most importantly, post-release employment and level of education were the two most influential predictors to recidivism among ex-prisoners, regardless of ethnicity

Panel: Overtime Compensation an Pay Equity in Higher Education (CLE)

The FLSA provides certain protections for individuals who are classified as employees. Employees are considered “non-exempt,” i.e., eligible for all of those protections (minimum wage and overtime) unless they fall within specific exemptions. The burden of proof is on the employer to establish that employees fall within an exemption. Colleges and universities often struggle with unique challenges in determining whether certain jobs are exempt. The exemptions below only focus on the requirements under the FLSA. There are often different and more restrictive requirements under state law that must be considered as well