Read Public Policy Articles with Replication Datasets

Do failures to recall known future expenses contribute to undersaving and seasonal poverty? This study tests whether prompting people to think through upcoming expenses—without giving new information—changes remembered spending and real financial behavior. Using a randomized field experiment among farmers in Zambia and a replication of belief effects among low-income Americans, the authors examine whether associative prompts reduce retrieval failures, raise savings, and smooth consumption over the hungry season.

This study asks whether policy implementation creates political feedback not only for direct beneficiaries but also for the "policy adjacent" — residents who live near a project but are not its direct recipients. Using a unique, geographically precise case, the analysis identifies how nearby affordable housing systematically shifts neighboring opinions.

This article asks whether three different justification framings for a road traffic emission trading system (ETS)—energy independence, economic resilience, and efficient climate mitigation—change public acceptance depending on people’s party preference and their level of political trust. Using an online survey experiment in Finland, the authors examine how framing effects vary across supporters of different parties and among respondents with high versus low political trust, and report that framing effects are conditional rather than uniform.

Guadalupe Tuñón, Thad Dunning, Felipe Monestier, Rafael Piñeiro, and Fernando Rosenblatt study whether temporarily rewarding punctual taxpayers with a randomized tax holiday improves compliance. The authors investigate a common policy idea—using lotteries or one-off rewards to encourage on-time payments—in a city with substantial nonpayment that needs reliable revenue.

Domestic legal enforcement for climate mitigation is often weak or ambiguous, which can undermine governments' commitments to reduce emissions. Erik Voeten (Journal of Politics) asks whether domestic court decisions holding governments accountable for emissions shortfalls make those commitments more credible in practice—measured by how financial markets respond.

Corruption in Italy and elsewhere often occurs through the misuse of public spending. Understanding whether rules that limit municipal spending can reduce corrupt behavior—without undermining service delivery—is central for designing effective anti-corruption and fiscal policies. Gianmarco Daniele and Tommaso Giommoni examine this trade-off in small Italian municipalities.

Does government treatment of religion affect intergroup religious violence in Western democracies? This study asks whether government-based religious discrimination against minorities and government support for majority religion influence religiously motivated societal violence involving Muslim minorities.

Brian T. Hamel investigates how locally elected school board members decide which schools receive discretionary modernization dollars. The paper asks whether electoral incentives — the desire to win future elections — shape how funds are distributed across neighborhoods within a single large district.

Cities across the United States routinely limit where multifamily housing can be built, shaping neighborhood composition, affordability, and who can live in a city. Alexander Sahn asks whether those land-use limits arose primarily from homeowners’ economic interests or whether they were also a deliberate tool to preserve racial segregation as Black migrants arrived in Northern cities during the Great Migration.

The public story that the middle class has been the major loser of recent decades is both conceptually and empirically flawed. New analysis of household employment and disposable income across six Western countries shows a different pattern: middle-class employment and incomes generally outpaced those of the working class between 1980 and 2020.

States have long been treated as “laboratories of democracy,” where learning and competition spread policy innovations. Building on policy feedback scholarship, this article develops a new framework of policy interdependence showing that state policies do more than teach or compete—they reshape interest-group politics across state lines.

New research finds that states with generous unemployment benefits reduce household borrowing during job loss. Using detailed state-level data, authors show lower benefit generosity increases debt levels significantly after job loss. Paradoxically, despite economic risks from high personal debt, voters support stronger safety nets in areas where credit substitutes for welfare protection.

State governments, known as 'laboratories of democracy,' design policies but often face implementation gaps. Existing theories on policy learning fall short. This study examines why some states acknowledge failed juvenile justice policies while others do not.

New findings reveal how postal infrastructure significantly boosted economic outcomes in both short-term and long-run analyses.

Existing welfare state indicators focus on inequality, not risk.

A nationwide unconditional cash transfer (UCT) rolled out in Colombia in March 2020 is evaluated to understand how emergency cash affected households during the COVID-19 pandemic. The program delivered US$19 per payment (PPP US$55.6) to 1 million households in poverty, with payments occurring every five to eight weeks.

Environmental nonprofit organizations (ENPOs) now play central roles in public policy debates by running information campaigns to attract attention and build support. Yet the credibility of the policy information ENPOs disclose has received little attention. This study applies Douglas and Wildavsky’s cultural theory (CT) to examine how ENPOs’ public faces and citizens’ worldviews jointly shape perceived credibility.

The COVID-19 pandemic reshaped American life, with state governments deploying policies like stay-at-home orders (SHOs) to combat the crisis.

During economic crises, state fiscal policies significantly impact income inequality.

New research examines the role of economic development incentives in shaping income inequality across U.S. states.

This article examines how comparative politics scholars evaluate structural reforms using counterfactual analysis. The piece focuses on the UK National Minimum Wage as a case study.

This study asks how learning from other states affects the comprehensiveness of state drunk-driving laws and whether lobbying by Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) conditions that relationship.

New policies often emerge after major political shifts known as punctuated equilibrium. Contrary to expectations, this article finds that post-punctuation policy changes are not random but follow predictable patterns in state charter school laws from 1996-2014.

This paper introduces a novel metric for assessing the effectiveness of social safety net programs called the poverty relief ratio. Unlike traditional measures that fail to account properly for varying income levels across countries, this new tool accurately reflects policy impacts even when adjusting for different definitions of poverty.

This paper examines how the timing of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) disbursements affects crime, focusing on grocery-store crime and theft. Two policy-driven sources of variation identify how spreading out benefit receipt changes short-term criminal activity.

Economic insecurity has made social welfare programs essential.

Income inequality intersects with state-level policies and market forces.