A wide range of social indicators turned sharply negative for Blacks in the late 1980s. The PI's intend to examine whether crack cocaine can explain these patterns. Despite a general appreciation of the potential importance of crack, very little empirical analysis has been done to date, due in part to the absence of quantitative measures of crack. The proposed research agenda proceeds in three steps. The first two of these are concerned with intellectual merit and the third with the broader impact of the proposed research.
Intellectual Merit First, the PI's develop an identification strategy for constructing an index of crack that can be estimated annually at the city, county, or state level. The basic insight underlying the index is that the arrival of crack causes a wide range of previously uncorrelated outcomes (e.g. youth homicide, cocaine-related emergency visits, low birth weight babies, fraction of children in foster care, etc.) to covary. Changes in these correlations before and after crack provide an indirect means of measuring the prevalence of crack. The PI's formalize this intuition using the tools of factor analysis. Preliminary estimation using a subset of the available data demonstrates that the crack index reproduces many of the spatial and temporal patterns described in ethnographic and popular accounts of the crack epidemic. The second part of the research agenda is to use the crack index to examine how much of the reversal of black fortunes in the late 1980s and early 1990s is attributable to crack. Preliminary analysis suggests that the rise and fall of crack had an enormous impact on youth homicide, but much smaller effects on homicide rates of adults, as well as violent and property crime more generally. The PI's find important effects of crack on fetal death, low birth weight babies, the placement of children into foster care, and the death rate of children aged one to four. Crack does not, however, appear to have an impact on poverty or unemployment rates. Understanding the timing of crack's rise and fall, and the corresponding social impact is the intellectual merit of the proposal. Broader Impacts The third aspect of the research agenda is to analyze the extent to which failure to adequately control for crack may have led to spurious results in prior research. For instance, it has been claimed that apparent crime reductions induced by concealed weapons laws or legalized abortion are actually due to the omission of crack as a control. Because crack appears to be an important determinant of outcomes, and the impact of crack is not uniform across states or years (or even within a state and year), the types of controls typically included in empirical studies will not properly control for crack. In addition to the PI's reanalyzing a number of prior studies, the crack index will be made freely available to other researchers for inclusion in future analyses, increasing the potential for the work to have broad impacts.
