BATF firearms traces are a tool for prosecution of individual crimes, with potential benefits in using the tracing data for law enforcement. There are, however, severe limitations on the utility of those data for criminological analysis and public policymaking aimed at reducing homicides, including the minimal number of trace attempts and successes, the rules for excluding guns and efforts to t...

This paper studies collective choice by participants possessing private information in policymaking institutions that involve cheap-talk communication and bargaining. The main result establishes a connection between the extent to which problems of this type posses fully-revealing equilibria that select policies in the full informationmajority rule core (when it is well-defined) and the extent t...

Many cities in the Global South are structurally different from Northern, particularly American, on which much of urban sociology’s conceptual apparatus has been based. Thus, depicting them terms a standard vocabulary risks imposing an inappropriate way seeing. We need that is able to accommodate their experience. This special issue contributes work building vocabulary. select five keywords soc...

Governments make policy decisions in the same areas in quite different institutions. Some assign policymaking responsibility to institutions designed to be insulated from myopic partisan and electoral pressures and others do not. In this study, we claim that differences in political context and institutional design constrain the policy choices governments make. Testable propositions based on an...

Executive Director William T. Pound Denver 7700 East First Place Denver, Colorado 80230 Phone (303) 364-7700 www.ncsl.org Washington, D.C. 444 North Capitol Street, NW, Suite 515 Washington, D.C. 20001 Phone (202) 624-5400 Interest in evidence-based policymaking is growing in state legislatures, particularly to address challenging social issues. Evidence-based policymaking involves investing in...

This paper examines the economic rationale of affordability exemptions in the context of a health insurance mandate. I provide an economic definition of affordability and discuss how it is implemented in the contexts of food, housing, and health care. Affordability standards are frequently used in making food and housing policy, but both empirically and theoretically health care operates quite ...