Promoting innovative government has attracted a bipartisan constituency. But if the concept of innovation is watered down to encompass any promising idea or any program change that hasn't been tried before, it will lose its power as a device to stimulate non-trivial improvements in governmental...

This paper examines income and consumption based measures of poverty for those 65 and over between 1972 and 2004. This study contributes to the existing literature on poverty in several ways. First, we construct consumption based measures of poverty that improve upon measures used in previous...

Why do states frequently act through supranational institutions, and why do these institutions look the way they do? While most studies emphasize the collective-gains rationale for delegated authority, the analysis presented here raises an altogether different possibility. What makes...

Optimal layoff rules in closed form are derived for all workers in a firm that downsizes under uncertainty and faces heterogeneous firing costs. The theoretical model predicts that the firm displaces workers with low firing costs, low expected future productivity growth, and low layoff option...

There are more than 500,000 elected officials in the United States, 96 percent of whom serve in local governments. Electoral density—the number of elected officials per capita or per governmental unit—varies greatly from place to place. The most electorally dense county has more than 20...

We examine the distributional consequences of the Unemployment Insurance (UI) payroll tax. Applying the ability-to-pay principle of equity, the UI payroll tax is quite regressive, while applying the benefits principle makes the UI program look quite good. We then simulate a revenue-neutral...

A recent and compelling study entitled Neurons to Neighborhoods, conducted by the Board on Children, Youth, and Families of the Institute of Medicine, calls attention to the importance of early emotional development in young children.1 Based on a careful review of neuroscience and developmental...

A controversy among economists and others interested in the limits of rational choice analysis, still running after an onset at least two decades ago, concerns whether intelligent people, and especially experts, can be subject to cognitive illusions. This note provides a striking illustration...

This discussion paper was prepared for the forthcoming Handbook of Public Administration, to be published by Sage Publications, Inc.

Perhaps the common social choice problem that any of us face in practice is when we find ourselves in a group that must choose one restaurant at which all of us will eat. We propose a method where, similar to the I-choose-you-cut rule for dividing a cake, individuals in the group take turns...