We explore how access to modern hospitals and medicine affects mortality by leveraging efforts of the Duke Endowment to modernize hospitals in the early twentieth century. The Endowment helped communities build and expand hospitals, obtain state-of-the-art medical technology, attract qualified medical personnel, and refine management practices. We find that Duke support increased the size and quality of the medical sector, fostering growth in not-for-profit hospitals and high-quality physicians. Duke funding reduced both infant mortality—with larger effects for Black infants than White infants—and long-run mortality. Finally, we find that communities aided by Duke benefited more from medical innovations.

In the United States, elections are often administered by directly elected local officials who run as members of a political party. Do these officials use their office to give their party an edge in elections? Using a newly collected dataset of nearly 5,900 clerk elections and a close-election regression discontinuity design, we compare counties that narrowly elect a Democratic election administrator to those that narrowly elect a Republican. We find that Democrats and Republicans serving similar counties oversee similar election results, turnout, and policies. We also find that reelection is not the primary moderating force on clerks. Instead, clerks may be more likely to agree on election policies across parties than the general public and selecting different election policies may only modestly affect outcomes. While we cannot rule out small effects that nevertheless tip close elections, our results imply that clerks are not typically and noticeably advantaging their preferred party.

White, male-dominated professions in the United States are marked with substantial gender and racial inequality in career advancement, yet they often face pressures to increase diversity. In these contexts, are theories of employer biases based on gender and racial stereotypes sufficient to explain patterns of hiring discrimination during common career transitions in the external labor market? If not, how and why do discrimination patterns deviate from predictions? Through a case study of software engineering, we first draw from a large-scale audit study and demonstrate unexpected patterns of hiring screening discrimination: while employers discriminate in favor of White men among early-career job applicants seeking lateral positions, for both early-career and senior workers applying to senior jobs, Black men and Black women face no discrimination compared to White men, and White women are preferred. Drawing on in-depth interviews, we explain these patterns of discrimination by demonstrating how decision-makers incorporate diversity value—applicants’ perceived worth for their contribution to organizational diversity—into hiring screening decisions, alongside biases. We introduce diversity commodification as the market-based valuative process by which diversity value varies across job level and intersectional groups. This article offers important implications for our understanding of gender, race, and employer decision-making in modern U.S. organizations.

In 2016, JASA Applications and Case Studies (ACS) introduced a reproducibility initiative to address the lack of standardized practices for reproducibility in scientific research. This initiative established minimum criteria for the inclusion of code, data, and workflow at JASA ACS, and piloted a new editorial role, Associate Editor of Reproducibility (AER), to implement these standards. This initiative has since expanded from ACS to all original research manuscripts published at JASA, including those submitted to JASA Theory and Methods (TM). Since the inception of the JASA reproducibility initiative, the team of AERs has grown, the process has become more standardized, the role of an AER in guiding reproducibility in statistical research has been refined (Willis and Stodden Citation2020) and, in 2023, we implemented a reproducibility award1 to recognize papers published in JASA with outstanding reproducibility materials. The goals of this editorial are to (a) explain the type of reproducibility that is being addressed during the review process at JASA, (b) describe the steps of this process and its underlying philosophy, and (c) clarify how authors can streamline the review of their reproducibility materials.

Heritage is powerful because it is used as a way to define and identify. It is about who we as humans think we are, based upon where we believe we have come from and where we intend to go. It is what is maintained from the past, by the present, for the next generation to inherit (in-heritage): from objects, buildings, land, resources, status, power, values, ontologies, epistemologies, axiologies, environments, and ecosystems. Current conceptions of heritage are imbued with human agency, as a “discursive construction” (Smith, 2006, 13) with “material consequences” (Harvey, 2008, 19) that is “constituted and constructed (and at the same time, constitutive and constructing)” (Wu and Hou, 2015, 39). As such, heritage has the potential for reworlding and refuturing (Haraway, 2016; Harrison, 2020; Holtorf and Högberg, 2020; Onciul, 2015; Smith, 2006, 2022; Tlostanova, 2022). It can highlight the brief duration in planetary or species time of colonialism and capitalism, while illustrating its failing prospects—evidenced by increasing global inequalities and the accelerating inhabitability of the Earth. This future-orientated power places heritage at the center of efforts to enact and affirm Indigenous rights and address colonial legacies and responsibilities in the ancestral territories now collectively known as Canada.

The energy crisis of the early 1970s briefly opened up a radically new horizon of energetic possibilities that played out differently around the world. For India, that energy crisis did not begin with the famous Arab oil embargo of 1973. Instead, like many poor oil-importing nations, it experienced the first oil shock as merely one component of a broader climate-food-energy emergency that reverberated throughout the political system. This crisis brought a twinned set of fateful changes. By June 1975, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had resorted to imposing a constitutional dictatorship—the Emergency—for the first and only time in independent India’s existence, one among a series of coups and authoritarian takeovers that swept the Global South. Less noticed was a second transformation with planetary ramifications. Rising popular expectations collided with the energy crisis to impel a state-led embrace of coal, despite elite reservations about the environmental damage that would follow. Analyzing these dynamics is crucial to understanding India’s intensifying coal dependence, and its rapidly rising carbon emissions, in the decades that followed. Only when we accurately recognize the forces that created and hold carbon-intensive energy regimes in place can we begin to see how they might be dislodged.

What drives us to search for creative ideas, and why does it feel good to find one? While previous studies demonstrated the positive influence of motivation on creative abilities, how reward and subjective values play a role in creativity remains unknown. This study proposes to characterize the role of individual preferences (how people value ideas) in creative ideation via behavioral experiments and computational modeling. Using the Free Generation of Associates Task coupled with rating tasks, we demonstrate the involvement of valuation processes during idea generation: Preferred ideas are provided faster. We found that valuation depends on the adequacy and originality of ideas and guides response selection and creativity. Finally, our computational model correctly predicts the speed and quality of human creative responses, as well as interindividual differences in creative abilities. Altogether, this model introduces the mechanistic role of valuation in creativity. It paves the way for a neurocomputational account of creativity mechanisms.