The purpose of this essay is to provide a foundation for understanding the "Great American Gun War," and to consider the next steps that could be taken in the search for an effective gun-control policy. We begin with a review of the more-or-less uncontroversial facts about trends in gun...

In the spring of 1998, Parents Advancing Choice in Education (PACE), a privately funded non-profit corporation, offered low-income parents within the Dayton metropolitan area an opportunity to apply for a scholarship to help defray the costs of sending their child to private schools in Dayton...

Each year, regulatory agencies promulgate thousands of important rules through a process largely insulated from ordinary citizens. Many observers believe the Internet could help revolutionize the rulemaking process, allowing citizens to play a central role in the development of new government...

It is commonly argued that one virtue of common-law rule-making (or law-making) is that the common law judge is enriched in being able to make legal rules while simultaneously seeing one concrete application of such a rule. Under the traditional view, the live dispute before the law-making court...

The book American Economic Policy in the 1990s, which has a publication date of Spring 2002 from MIT Press, is the outcome of a conference held at the Kennedy School in June 2001. It brought together leading policy-makers and economists, with the goal of providing a preliminary history of U.S....

The multilateral regime to address the problem of global climate change is manifest in the Kyoto Protocol, negotiated in that city in 1997, and likely soon to enter into force. The multilateral regime to address international trade is manifest in the World Trade Organization, established in...

When are decentralized public institutions most likely to succeed in promoting effective public good provision or the emergence of local cooperation? Two influential literatures in political science, those on "empowered participatory governance" and on "market-preserving federalism," both...

In an era of devolution in much social policy, a growing number of initiatives aim to improve the well-being of children, youth, and their families through locally governed, data-driven “partnerships” of various kinds. Broadly stated, the aims of these partnerships are not limited to savvy...

Stereotypes bias person perception, hampering advancement in organizations for targets-often women and members of ethnic minority groups. Traditional stereotyping research adopts an inter-group perspective: comparisons are made between the ways in which targets belonging to different social...

Global environmental change is increasingly understood to have causes, consequences, and responses which span multiple levels, from the local to the global. The multi-level nature of such problems has required a radical shift in the relationship between knowledge and action. This working paper...