Reluctant Customers: Presidents and Policy Advice

Policy Evaluation and Economic Policy Advice Christoph

Policy Evaluation and Economic Policy Advice Arguably, one of the most important developments in the field of applied economics during the last decades has been the emergence of systematic policy evaluation, with its distinct focus on the establishment of causality. By contrast to the natural sciences, the objects of our scientific interest typically exert some influence on their treatment stat...

Policy Evaluation and Economic Policy Advice

Policy Evaluation and Economic Policy Advice Arguably, one of the most important developments in the field of applied economics during the last decades has been the emergence of systematic policy evaluation, with its distinct focus on the establishment of causality. By contrast to the natural sciences, the objects of our scientific interest typically exert some influence on their treatment stat...

Presidents, Vice Presidents, and Death: Closing the Constitution's Succession Gap

Economics versus Politics: Pitfalls of Policy Advice

T he fundamental approach to policy prescription in economics derives from the recognition that the presence of market failures—like externalities, public goods, monopoly, and imperfect competition—creates room for well-designed public interventions to improve social welfare. This tradition, already clear in Pigou (1912), was elaborated by Samuelson (1947), and still provides the basis of most ...

Policy Advice with Imperfectly Informed Experts

We study policy advice by several experts with noisy private information and biased preferences. We highlight a trade-off between the truthfulness of the information revealed by each expert and the number of signals from different experts that can be aggregated to reduce noise. Contrary to models with perfectly informed experts, because of this trade-off, full revelation of information is never...