What's Black and White and Red All Over?

Child Molesters and Home Values

"Megan's Law" and similar statutes may or may not make kids safer from sex predators, but they do drive down property values when a child molester moves into a neighborhood, according to two economists.

Those laws were mandated by Congress after 7-year-old Megan Nicole Kanka was raped and murdered by a twice-convicted pedophile in 1994. They require states to register convicted sex offenders and make their names and addresses publicly available.

Economists Leigh L. Linden and Jonah E. Rockoff of Columbia University used the list of registered sex offenders living in Mecklenburg County, N.C., to study home values before and after an offender moved in.

"Houses within a one-tenth-mile area around the home of a sex offender fall by four percent on average (about $5,500) while those further away show no decline," they reported in a working paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research.

So Shut Up Already

Talking to passengers may be just as dangerous for drivers as talking on a cellphone, according to a study released by the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute.

James Sayer, an assistant research scientist at the institute, and his colleagues found that drivers who are talking with passengers perform similarly to those yakking on cellphones. For example, the study found that drivers chatting with a passenger were not notably better at staying in the correct lane or steering properly than were drivers who were talking on a cellphone.

Who Would Have Thought?Beer Ads, Regretting Sex and the Kinks

· "Effects of Showing Risk in Beer Commercials to Young Drinkers" by Lara Zwarun, et al., Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, Vol. 50, No. 1. A University of Texas researcher and her colleagues find that college students exposed to TV beer ads depicting activities that are hazardous to perform while drinking, such as snowboarding, were more likely to think it was all right to drink and drive.

· "Sex Differences in Regret: All for Love or Some for Lust?" by Neal Roese, et al., Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Vol. 32, No. 6. A research team headed by a University of Illinois psychologist finds that men are more likely to regret missed opportunities for sex than to regret sexual activity, while women are equally likely to regret the times they did and the times they didn't.

· " Za Kinkusu : Ray Davies and the Rise and Fall and Rise of Japanese Rock and Roll" by Michael K. Bourdaghs, Popular Music and Society, Vol. 29, No. 2. A UCLA Asian-language scholar chronicles the influence of the Kinks on Japanese rock-and-roll in a special issue of this journal devoted to the seminal British Invasion rock band.