This is the Introduction to a forthcoming book (McGraw-Hill, January 2002) on the origin of the Scientific Revolution. It includes a chapter-by-chapter outline of the book.

This article explores the conditions under which exiting authoritarian elites use institutions strategically to fend off the threat of democracy. One way that authoritarian elites can execute this "institutional insulation" is by making the central bank autonomous from the influence of elected...

The Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) is the most important federal legislation addressing the credit needs of low-income families and neighborhoods. Enacted in 1977 in response to concerns about redlining, CRA established "continuing and affirmative obligations" for lenders to meet the credit...

This paper sets forth the following ideas: (1) The New Public Management (NPM) is both a paradigm for administrative reform - a set of answers - and an organizing theme for public administration scholarship - a set of questions. (2) At one end of a production continuum at which publicly-provided...

The Dual Effects of Intellectual Property Regulations: Within- and Between-Patent Competition in the US Pharmaceuticals Industry

Some scholars have suggested that offering a middle alternative on a rating scale is necessary to measure opinions accurately, whereas other scholars have suggested that middle alternatives offer "easy outs" to respondents who want to avoid taking sides on an issue. In this paper, we evaluate...

In 1998, California changed its regulation of working hours from daily overtime (required overtime for hours above eight per day) to weekly overtime (required overtime for hours above forty per week). We analyze the effects of this change in overtime law on hours of work using a neoclassical...

Cohabitation is an increasingly prevalent living arrangement in the United States. Although the effects of living in a cohabiting arrangement on child well-being are not fully understood, the literature on children growing up in cohabiting families suggests that they have poorer developmental...

This paper develops a new method for estimating the structural parameters of dynamic programming problems in which choices are discrete. The method reduces the computational burden of estimating such models. We show the valuation functions characterizing the expected future utility function...

Institutional reform litigation places significant, and, at times, inappropriate constraints on the public manager’s ability to balance individual and collective justice. An exemplary misuse of such litigation was the recent New York child welfare case of Marisol A. v. Giuliani. The U.S....