Published Research

The literature on EU integration has long recognized that the European Commission has promoted a pan‐European civil society in order to increase the legitimacy of the supranational institutions. While we know the Commission fosters EU civil society by encouraging their formal and informal participation in the EU policymaking processes and by directly funding them (Mahoney 2004), we have, until now, known very little about just how much money the Commission has been granting EU civil society organizations and to which segments of European civil society.

Food insecurity is experienced by millions of Americans and has increased dramatically in recent years. Due to its prevalence and many demonstrated negative health consequences, food insecurity is one of the most important nutrition-related public health issues in the U.S.

School districts are confronting difficult choices in the aftermath of the financial crisis. Today, the financial imbalance in many school districts is so large that there may be few alternatives to teacher layoffs.

World Bank - (draft)

Risky health behaviors such as smoking, drinking alcohol, drug use, unprotected sex, and poor diets and sedentary lifestyles (leading to obesity) are a major source of preventable deaths. This chapter overviews the theoretical frameworks for, and empirical evidence on, the economics of risky health behaviors.

Salience and satisfaction are important factors in determining the comparisons that people make. We hypothesized that people make salient comparisons first, and then make satisfying comparisons only if salient comparisons leave them unsatisfied.

Recent experimental research suggests that humans are prone to systematic errors when determining how they currently feel, imagining how they will feel about future events, remembering how they have felt about past events, and understanding the preferences that underlie their decisions. In this article, we briefly review three basic assumptions that are called into question by recent findings regarding specific kinds of errors that people are prone to make. We suggest that this line of research has important implications for negotiation theory, research, advice, and practice.

Traditional defined benefit (DB) pension plans remain the overwhelming norm for teachers, policemen and other employees of state and local governments. The incentives for workers with DB pension plans to stay in their jobs shift dramatically over the course of their careers.

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.

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.

The relationship between money and happiness is surprisingly weak, which may stem in part from the way people spend it. Drawing on empirical research, we propose eight principles designed to help consumers get more happiness for their money.