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...

Reinforcement learning based on direct search in policy space requires few assumptions about the environment. Hence it is applicable in certain situations where most traditional reinforcement learning algorithms based on dynamic programming are not, especially in partially observable, deterministic worlds. In realistic settings, however, reliable policy evaluations are complicated by numerous s...

This paper provides an overview of current thinking about the use of scientific findings in policy making about environmental issues. As Funtowicz and Ravetz [14] have pointed out, issues of global environmental change differ from “traditional scientific problems”, because they are global in scale and have long-term impacts, data are generally inadequate and the phenomena are complex and not we...

The adequacy of the concept of willingness to pay within health economics evaluations is reviewed. A considerable number of researchers in the literature have pointed out multiple methodological issues involving willingness-to-pay estimates. On the other hand, the theoretical discussion about the aggregation of individual preferences within an aggregate demand remains open. However, over the la...

Exams with numerus clausus are very common in Medicine, Business Administration and Law. They are intended to select a predefined number of academic candidates on the basis of their rank rather than their absolute performance. Various scholars and politicians believe that numerus clausus policies are a vector of academic excellence. We argue, however, that they could have ironic epistemic effec...

Over the last decade there has been a growing interest in exploring the unanticipated health impacts of social and economic policies designed mainly to improve well-being, reduce discrimination, maintain family stability and improve mobility for disadvantaged populations. Since many of these policies are closely linked to the channels through which ‘social determinants’ may impact health, this ...

This study examined the age-specific pattern of effects of welfare policies on child achievement. Drawing from 7 random-assignment welfare and antipoverty evaluations that provided more than 30,000 observations of children's achievement, this study found that times of developmental transition are the only periods sensitive to the changes in families brought about by these policies. More specifi...

INTRODUCTION The development and implementation of multisectoral policy to improve health and reduce health inequities has been slow and uneven. Evidence is largely focused on the facts of health inequities rather than understanding the political and policy processes. This 5-year funded programme of research investigates how these processes could function more effectively to improve equitable p...

Traditional methods of risk assessment have provided good service in support of policy, mainly in relation to standard setting and regulation of hazardous chemicals or practices. In recent years, however, it has become apparent that many of the risks facing society are systemic in nature - complex risks, set within wider social, economic and environmental contexts. Reflecting this, policy-makin...

Initiatives to engage the public in health policy decisions have been widely endorsed and used, yet agreed upon methods for systematically evaluating the effectiveness of these initiatives remain to be developed. Dukhanin, Topazian, and DeCamp have thus developed a useful taxonomy of evaluation criteria derived from a systematic review of published evaluation tools that might serve as the basis...