Published Research

Scholars from the fields of behavioral economics, education, and public policy explore contemporary research on decision-making and highlight behavioral insights that can improve postsecondary access and success. Written in collaboration with Saul Schwartz, Professor of Public Policy and Administration at Carleton University, Canada and Sandy Baum, Research Professor of Education Policy at George Washington University and a Senior Fellow at the Urban Institute, USA.

E-signatures are one of the fastest growing global practices because of their convenience. Much less is known, however, about whether people perceive e-signatures to be symbolically equivalent to traditional hand signatures.

The field of nonmarket strategy has expanded rapidly over the past 20 years to provide theoretical and practical guidance for managers seeking to influence policymaking. Much of this scholarship has built directly on spatial and “pivotal politics” models of lawmaking.

Framing plays an important role in public policy. Interest groups strategically highlight some aspects of a policy proposal while ignoring others in order to gain an advantage in the policy debate.

Federal and other regulatory agencies often use or claim to use a weight of evidence (WoE) approach in chemical evaluation. Their approaches to the use of WoE, however, differ significantly, rely heavily on subjective professional judgment, and merit improvement.

Framing plays an important role in lobbying, as interest groups strategically highlight some aspects of policy proposals while ignoring others to shape policy debates in their favour. However, due to methodological difficulties, we have remarkably little systematic data about the framing strategies of interest groups.

One of the most important demonstrations of power in Washington is the ability to recruit sitting government officials to become active proponents of one’s position. Many have suggested money is the key: Campaign contributions buy friends, access, and perhaps even policy activism.

This paper documents the production of a panel of price indices for housing services, other produced goods, and all produced goods for each metropolitan area in the United States and the non-metropolitan part of each state from 1982 through 2012 that can be used for estimating behavioral relationships, studying the workings of markets, and assessing differences in the economic circumstances of people living in different areas. Our general approach is to first produce cross-sectional price indices for a single year 2000 and then use BLS time-series price indices to create the panel.

Interstate war data are critical for many important research areas in international relations. Scholars working in these areas frequently rely on the Correlates of War (COW) interstate war data.