Indian government policy: Committed to science

Applying behavioural science to government policy: Finding the ‘Goldilocks Zone’

Using behavioural and social science to inform government policy has the potential to benefit society – provided good scientific practice is adopted. We argue that there are threats to scientific practice in the current Behavioural Insights environment that potentially undermine the validity and usefulness of such work. We discuss what constitutes good science and why this is important, and exa...

Government Policy Response to War-Expenditure Shocks

A theory of government policy determination, based on intertemporal distortion-smoothing and limited commitment, matches the set of stylized facts of U.S. wartime policy.

Scientific approaches to science policy

The development of robust science policy depends on use of the best available data, rigorous analysis, and inclusion of a wide range of input. While director of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS), I took advantage of available data and emerging tools to analyze training time distribution by new NIGMS grantees, the distribution of the number of publications as a function ...

Mergers and Government Policy *

It has long been thought that government antitrust policy has an effect on aggregate merger and acquisition activity, but the empirical support for this hypothesis has been weak and inconsistent. This paper uses a new empirical specification and a new dataset on mergers and acquisitions to provide support for this conjecture. Regression analysis shows that government policy has a significant in...

Government Policy Effects on