Government policies sometimes cause unintended consequences for other potentially desirable behaviors. One such policy is the charitable tax deduction, which encourages charitable giving by allowing individuals to deduct giving from taxable income. Whether charitable giving and other desirable behaviors are complements or substitutes affect the…

Networks have become a central concept in the policy and public management literature; however, theoretical development is hindered by a lack of attention to the empirical properties of network measurement methods. This paper compares three survey-based methods for measuring organizational networks: the roster, the free-recall name generator, and…

This article examines the impacts of Building Strong Families, a healthy marriage and relationship skills education program serving unmarried parents who were expecting or had recently had a baby. Based on a random assignment research design, the analysis uses survey data from more than 4,700 couples across eight research sites to estimate program…

Fundraising campaigns advertised via mass media are common. To what extent such campaigns affect charitable behavior is mostly unknown, however. Using giving and volunteering surveys conducted biennially from 1988 to 1996, I investigate the effect of a national fundraising campaign, "Give Five," on charitable giving and volunteering patterns. The…

This paper analyzes the effect of state-level Sunday alcohol sales restrictions ("blue laws") on fatal vehicle accidents, which is an important parameter in assessing the desirability of these laws. Using a panel data set of all fatal vehicle accidents in the U.S. between 1990 and 2009 combined with 15 state repeals of blue laws, we show that…

We use regression discontinuity methods on a representative survey of Texas high school seniors to discern the impact on flagship-enrollment behavior of the Texas top 10 percent law, which guarantees admission to any Texas public university to students who graduate in the top decile of their class. By comparing students at and immediately below…

This article examines the political economy of preferences with respect to the environment using a new stated preference survey that presents the first benefit values for national water quality levels. The mean valuation greatly exceeds the median value, as the distribution of valuations is highly skewed. The study couples the survey valuations…

We describe trends in maternal employment and leave-taking after birth of a newborn and analyze the extent to which these behaviors are influenced by parental leave policies. Data are from the June Current Population Survey (CPS) Fertility Supplements, merged with other months of the CPS, and cover the period 1987 to 1994. This time span is one…

Using pooled cross-sectional data from the 1992 to 2005 March Current Population Survey (CPS), this study examines the relationship between minimum wage increases and the economic well-being of single mothers. Estimation results show that minimum wage increases were ineffective at reducing poverty among single mothers. Most working single mothers…

There is little research on knowledge of the policy rules that could affect individuals, either in general or in evaluations of new programs. The lack of research is surprising, given that knowledge gaps could limit the effectiveness of reforms or lead to incorrect inferences regarding the effects of a policy change. In this article, we use survey…

Many studies over the past 20 years have looked at the response of charitable donations to tax incentives--the tax price elasticity of giving. Generally, authors have assumed this elasticity is constant across all types of giving. Using the 2001 Panel Study of Income Dynamics data on charitable giving, this paper estimates the tax price elasticity…

Differences in administrative (UI) and survey (S) records on employment and earnings have substantial implications for assessing the impact of a variety of public interventions, such as welfare-to-work and employment training programs, and especially the state-oriented welfare reform legislation of 1996. We use data from the 1998 and 1999 waves of…

On April 1, 1994, Ontario, Canada, instituted a new graduated driver license (GDL) system that effectively set the legal blood alcohol content (BAC) threshold at zero for the first few years of a youth's driving eligibility. I use data from the 1983-2001 Ontario Student Drug Use Surveys (OSDUS) to examine whether the Zero Tolerance (ZT) policy…

Contracting critics suggest that when governments outsource, they reduce their capacity to produce services and manage service delivery. In this paper, we decompose the service delivery decision into service production and service management components. When governments contract for service production, they may also choose to contract for a…

We present the first empirical assessment of the U.K. Labour government's program of public management reform. This reform program is based on rational planning, devolution and delegation, flexibility and incentives, and enhanced choice. Measures of these variables are tested against external and internal indicators of organizational performance.…