Published Research

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.

This book explores why some members of Congress are more effective than others at navigating the legislative process and what this means for how Congress is organized and what policies it produces. Craig Volden and Alan E. Wiseman develop a new metric of individual legislator effectiveness (the Legislative Effectiveness Score) that will be of interest to scholars, voters, and politicians alike.

The Environmental Protection Agency plans to issue new federal regulations to limit drinking water concentrations of perchlorate, which occurs naturally and results from the combustion of rocket fuel. This article presents an upper-bound estimate of the potential benefits of alternative maximum contaminant levels for perchlorate in drinking water.

In federal systems, governments have the opportunity to learn from the policy experiments – and the potential successes – of other governments. Whether they seize such opportunities, however, may depend on the expertise or past experiences of policymakers.

What factors inhibit or facilitate cross-subfield conversations in political science? This article draws on diffusion scholarship to gain insight into cross-subfield communication.

We use a set of economic experiments to test the effects of some novel features of California’s new controls on greenhouse gas emissions. The California cap and trade scheme imposes limits on allowance ownership, uses a tiered price containment reserve sale, and settles allowance auctions based on the lowest accepted bid.

A naïve undergraduate is transported from a small California town to the intensely competitive world of Capitol Hill policymaking. Gerald Felix Warburg’s memoir is not just a story about four decades in Washington, although a life spent as a House of Representatives and Senate staffer, and as a lobbyist and professor, provides remarkable insight into the struggles, the strategies, and the people of the U.S. capital.

The Obama administration has made a major investment in comparative effectiveness research (CER) to learn what treatments work best for which patients. CER has the potential to reduce wasteful medical spending and improve patient outcomes, but the political sustainability of this initiative remains unclear due to concerns that it will threaten the doctor-patient relationship.

The federal government has multiple housing policies to pursue multiple goals. For example, it promotes homeownership primarily through provisions of the individual income tax.