Using data supplied by InformedSources I find additional flaws in the ACCC analysis of FuelWatch. First, the drop in petrol prices that is so visually convincing in the ACCC chart S1 is in fact an artifact of the method of data construction and can be attributed primarily to increases in prices...

Widely advocated as a means to make policy making more integrated, policy assessment remains weakly integrated in practice. But explanations for this shortfall, such as lack of staff training and resources, ignore more fundamental institutional factors. This paper identifies institutional...

In an effort to promote evidence-based practice, government officials, researchers, and program developers have developed lists of model programs in the prevention field. This article reviews the evidence used by seven best-practice lists to select five model prevention programs. The...

This article describes the background to the What Works initiative launched by Barnardo's in the early 1990s, with a focus on the What Works for Children series of reports published from 1995 onwards. The author describes the intellectual and social context of the initiative, the approach taken,...

Both public and private health and social care services are facing increased and changing demands to improve quality and reduce costs. To enable local services to respond to these demands, governments and other organisations have established large scale improvement programmes. These usually seek...

It has often been suggested that Bayesian statistics is more congenial to the informational needs of policy makers than the standard frequentist methods. In order to illustrate this claim, we use both a Bayesian and a frequentist approach for revisiting a recommendation by the Dutch National...

The BLU properties of OLS estimators under known assumptions have encouraged the widespread use of OLS multivariate regression analysis in many empirical studies that are based upon a conceptual model of a single explanatory equation. However, such a model may well be an imperfect empirical...