Research

Published Research

Privatization and the Diffusion of Innovations

Authors: Craig Volden, Vanessa Bouché

The privatization of government services tends to bring about a more rapid adoption of innovative policies due to the competitive pressures of the market. In federal systems, however, the diffusion of innovations across subnational governments may offset such benefits of privatization. 

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Published Research

Breaking Gridlock: The Determinants of Health Policy Change in Congress

Authors: Craig Volden, Alan E. Wiseman

Scholars have often commented that health policymaking in Congress is mired in political gridlock, that reforms are far more likely to fail than to succeed, and the path forward is unclear. To reach such conclusions, scholars of health politics have tended to analyze individual major reform proposals to determine why they succeeded or failed and what lessons could be drawn for the future. 

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Published Research

When a Nudge Isn't Enough: Defaults and Saving Among Low-Income Tax Filers

Authors: Erin Bronchetti, David Huffman, Ellen Magenheim

Recent evidence suggests that the default options implicit in economic choices (e.g., 401(k) savings by white-collar workers) have extraordinarily large effects on decision-making. This study presents a field experiment that evaluates the effect of defaults on savings among a highly policy-relevant population: low-income tax filers.

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Published Research

Pensions and K-12 Teacher Retirement: An Analysis Using National Teacher Data

The retirement security landscape has changed drastically for most workers over the last thirty years – except for public school teachers and other state and local government employees. Many private-sector employers have stopped offering traditional retirement plans, while most state and local employees remain covered by defined benefit (DB) pension plans. 

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Published Research

Labor Market Effects of Pensions and Implications for Teachers

Authors: Leora Friedberg

While the retirement security landscape has changed drastically for most workers over the last twenty years, traditional defined benefit (DB) pension plans remain the overwhelming norm for K–12 teachers. Because DB plans pay off fully with a fixed income after retirement only if a teacher stays in the profession for decades and yield little or nothing if a teacher leaves early, DB plans induce a strong, nonlinear relationship between years of tenure and benefit accrual.

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Published Research

Relative deprivation and intergroup competition

Two experiments utilized a new experimental paradigm—the Intergroup Prisoner’s Dilemma— Maximizing Difference (IPD-MD) game—to study how relative deprivation at the group level affects intergroup competition. The IPD-MD game enables group members to make a costly contribution to either a within-group pool that benefits fellow ingroup members, or a between-group pool, which, in addition, harms outgroup members.

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