One answer to the question of why government organizations don't perform better-common in academic “public choice” literature but also in folk wisdom-is that resources come too easily, independent of performance. Some businessmanagement literature suggests that a crisis in resource flows can...

Nonprofit organizations play a critical role in U.S. housing policy, a role typically justified by the claim that their housing investments produce significant neighbor-hood spillover benefits. However, little work has actually been done to measure these impacts on neighborhoods. This paper...

In this paper, we address the often contentious debate over state and local recycling policy by carefully estimating the social net benefit of curbside recycling. Benefits are estimated using household survey data from over 4,000 households across 40 western U.S. cities. We calibrate household...

The past two decades have seen a rising trend in the minimum entrance age for kindergarten in the U.S. A little-noticed, but potentially large, consequence of raising the minimum entrance age is that it imposes additional childcare costs for families whose children are forced to stay out of...

This article examines interstate variation in household food security. Using hierarchical modeling, we identify several kinds of state characteristics that appear linked to household food security: the availability and accessibility of federal nutrition assistance programs, policies affecting...

Public management scholars often claim that agency competition provides an effective institutional check on monopoly authority, and hence, leads to improvement of administrative performance in public sector agencies. This logic was central for creating the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) in...

Declines in the welfare caseload in the late 1990s brought significant change to the lives of many low-educated, single mothers. Many single mothers left welfare and entered the labor market and others found different ways to avoid going on public assistance. These changes may have affected the...

Kindergarten policy varies widely both across and within states. Over the past decade, a number of states have instituted a full-day kindergarten requirement and others are considering it as a way to increase educational achievement. Many parents also support full-day kindergarten as a source of...