Public Lecture: Thinking about Oil: Energy Epistemologies and Political Futures

Thinking about Russia: plausible pasts and probable futures.

This paper uses both correlational and experimental methods to explore the power of counterfactual cognitions about the past to constrain judgments about the future as well as policy preferences. Study 1 asked 47 specialists on the Soviet Union to assess both the plausibility of controversial counterfactuals and the probability of controversial conditional forecasts. The results reveal deep ide...

Positive fantasies about idealized futures sap energy

New Thinking About Grassroots Public Management

Governments often use multiple policy instruments for pursuing policy goals with mutually reinforcing eff ects. Th ese eff ects include supplementation and substitution. Th is article examines both eff ects by studying two instruments of state budget stabilization policy: general fund balances and budget stabilization funds. States normally maintain budget surpluses in the general fund. In rece...

Thinking About Drug Law Reform: Some Political Dynamics of Medicalization

The article begins by stating that many people believe that medicalization offers the most reasonable approach to drug policy because it offers a dignified approach to treatment of addicts. However, it risks being a form of repression itself because it may define abstinence as the only acceptable treatment outcome. The article then explores the position of the medical profession in drug policy....

Futures Maturity and Hedging Effectiveness: The Case of Oil Futures

This paper examines the effect of the maturity of the futures contact used as the hedging instrument on the effectiveness of futures hedging. For this purpose, daily and monthly data on the WTI crude oil futures and spot prices are used to work out the hedge ratios and the measures of hedging effectiveness resulting from using the near-month contract and those resulting from the use of a more d...