Profile
I received my doctorate in Public Policy from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University in 1991. Public Policy is an interdisciplinary field incorporating insights and methods of analysis from political science, economics, sociology, operations research, and other fields. From 1991 to 1996, I was an Assistant Professor of Political Economy in the School of Economic, Political and Policy Sciences at UTD. From January of 1997 until June of 1998, I was a Visiting Professor at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. In the fall of 1998, I returned to UTD as an Associate Professor of Political Economy with tenure, having been promoted while on leave.
The primary focus of my research has been segregation by race and class. In 1997, I published my first book, Poverty and Place: Ghettos, Barrios, and the American City (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1997). The book documents and the growing concentration of poverty in U.S. metropolitan areas between 1970 and 1990 and explores the causes and consequences of this trend. The book has been selected as one of Choice magazine's “Outstanding Academic Books of 1997” and was selected as the “Best Book on Urban Affairs Published in 1997 or 1998” by the Urban Affairs Association. The book is widely cited and frequently assigned in graduate courses in a number of disciplines, including sociology, economics, urban planning, and public policy.
One of the central conclusions of my research is that high-poverty neighborhoods, such as ghettos and barrios, are just a manifestation of much larger process of metropolitan change. Cities are expanding and becoming more segregated along economic lines. As the outer suburbs pursue monolithic upper-income development patterns, the poor and lower-middle class are increasingly left behind in the central cities and decaying inner-ring suburbs. In such neighborhoods, they are social, economically, and spatially isolated, exacerbating the effects of poverty and decreasing the chances of upward mobility.
My current research agenda includes a number of different but related elements. First, I am working on the connections between suburban sprawl and patterns of racial and economic segregation. Second, as part of project with Susan Mayer at the University of Chicago and Christopher Jencks at Harvard, I am examining the consequences of segregation by race and class on social and economic outcomes for young adults, such as dropping out of school and out-of-wedlock child-bearing. Third, I am working on two methodological papers concerning the measurement of segregation. The first of these deals with extending the Index of Dissimilarity to incorporate multiple political and geographic hierarchies. The second paper concerns a modification of the Index to more fully incorporate spatial information using GIS. In addition to these main lines of enquiry, I have a number of other research interests, including the effects of Medicaid on children’s health, the health consequences of poverty concentration, and inter-generational economic mobility.
- Updated: October 18, 2006
