What causes a government to adopt a new program or policy? Despite a large number of empirical studies available to date, the relative importance of various determinants remains obscure because of difficulties of statistical identification. We present an experimental setting to study the diffusion of policy innovations in the laboratory. Our approach discriminates between policy experimentation...

For decades scholars of state politics have studied the ways in which innovations in public policy diffuse across the states. Several studies indicate that policy diffusion is an explicitly dyadic process whereby states learn and adopt policies from their neighbors in geographic, social, economic, and political space. This dyadic diffusion process implies the existence of a policy diffusion net...

Hardly any week passes by in ‘Old Europe’ without a discussion about tax reforms as a reaction to the fl at tax challenge of new member countries of the European Union (EU). By many observers this is interpreted as an expression of the race to the bottom that supposedly results from fi erce tax competition in Europe and around the globe. Instead of looking at descriptive fi gures of corporate i...

Concern over climate change impacts and the projected depletion of fossil fuels has urged more governments to adopt policies that stimulate the diffusion of renewable energy technologies (RET). With an increasingly diverse suite of support instruments, the question emerges as to which instruments or combinations are able to achieve faster, more substantial diffusion results. Although various su...

In this paper, we develop an agent-based model of a market game in order to evaluate the effectiveness of the U.K. government’s 2008–2010 policy on promoting smart metering in the U.K. retail electricity market. We break down the policy into four possible policy options. With the model, we study the impact of the four policy options on the dynamics of smart metering diffusion and suggest policy...

What causes a government to adopt a new program or policy? Despite a large number of empirical studies available to date, the relative importance of various determinants remains obscure because of difficulties of statistical identification. We present an experimental setting to study the diffusion of policy innovations in the laboratory. Our approach discriminates between experimentation, exper...

BACKGROUND Following the tenets of world polity and innovation diffusion theories, I focus on the coercive and mimetic forces that influence the diffusion of mental health policy across nations. International organizations' mandates influence government behavior. Dependency on external resources, namely foreign aid, also affects governments' formulation of national policy. And finally, mounting...

BACKGROUND Since the passage of Proposition 99, California's comprehensive tobacco control programme has benefited from a localised policy adoption process that allows for the innovation and diffusion of strong local tobacco control policies throughout the state. METHODS The policy adoption continuum is described in the context of California's smoke-free workplace movement, and the influence ...

It is widely recognized that fragile states are key symptoms of under-development in many parts of the world. Such states are incapable of delivering basic services to their citizens and political violence is commonplace. As of yet, mainstream development economics has not dealt in any systematic way with such concerns and the implications for development assistance. This paper puts forward a f...