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Abstract
My dissertation analyzes several contemporary policy-based and institutional occurrences in an urban setting to help guide further advancements in reducing violence, drug overdose deaths, and other unhealthy behaviors that city governments look to curb. Several recent developments in Philadelphia offer a promising setting for studying policies that have broad implications.
Chapter 1 examines the effect of the West Philadelphia Promise Zone initiative on violent crime rates in a high-crime area of West Philadelphia, where a series of educational, public-safety, and quality-of-life improvement grants were disbursed from 2014 onward. My difference-in-differences analysis with two-way fixed effects and cluster bootstrapped standard errors provides the first causal evidence of a modest (approximately 10%) reduction in violent crime, primarily assaults, attributable to this program. By the end of 2019, violent crime in the Promise Zone descended to around the average level across Philadelphia. A synthetic difference-in-differences estimator corroborates this result. In addition, I find evidence that one of the primary grants of the Promise Zone led to increased standardized test scores.
Chapter 2 examines the effect of an information treatment on openness to a particular social service. Fentanyl overdose is a leading cause of death for Americans ages 18 to 45. Recently, an organization called Safehouse attempted to open a “Supervised-Injection Facility” (SIF) in South Philadelphia. Here, intravenous drug-users would have been able to legally use drugs under medical supervision. After progressing past legal hurdles and planning a relatively short-noticed opening, the organization faced immense backlash and “not in my backyard” (NIMBY) sentiment from the local community, ultimately leading to the cancellation of the site. This paper applies contingent valuation survey techniques to this novel scenario in the city of Philadelphia. I find strong evidence of a NIMBY effect, where approximately one half of respondents who support the opening of an SIF relatively far away from them oppose or are unsure of its placement within a mile of their residence. I also find that a randomly assigned information treatment is effective in increasing respondents’ openness to an SIF in their area. Additionally, I find that the perceived cost to residents of an SIF on their block is high: potentially thousands of dollars per month. Support is substantially higher among respondents from Kensington, the heart of Philadelphia’s drug epidemic.
Chapter 3 provides the first analysis examining whether Sugar-Sweetened Beverage (SSB) taxes inadvertently led to increased birth rates within urban populations. Due to the staggered nature of urban soda tax implementation across the United States (and lack of parallel trends), I implement the Staggered Synthetic Difference-in-Differences estimator on county-level births per birthing aged woman across the United States. Despite there being a link in the medical literature between soda consumption and reduced fertility, and literature finding successful demand reductions from SSB taxes, results suggest that urban soda taxes do not reduce soda consumption enough to have a noticeable effect on birth rates.
