BACKGROUND Strong opinions for or against the use of systematic reviews to inform policymaking have been published in the medical literature. The purpose of this paper was to examine whether funding sources and author financial conflicts of interest were associated with whether an opinion article was supportive or critical of the use of systematic reviews for policymaking. We examined the natur...

We study the effects of environmental policy commitments in a futuristic world in which solar radiation management (SRM) can be utilized to reduce climate change damages. Carbon and sulfur dioxide emissions (correlated pollutants) can be reduced through tradable permits. We show that if nations simultaneously commit to carbon permit policies, national SRM levels rise with carbon quotas. Alterna...

Ferejohn and Shipan introduce a game theoretic model of sequential statutory policymaking, in which an administrative agency implements a regulatory policy and three actors court, legislature, and executive are then allowed to sequentially respond by not acting or overturning the agency decision in favor of an alternative policy. The authors find that the agency has substantial policymaking dis...

Federalist systems are considered centralized when the national government has greater weight in the formation and implementation of public policy and in decisions concerning resource allocation than subnational governments. In a decentralized federal system, subnational governments have some degree of autonomy or discretion in these two arenas. Even though national and subnational governments ...

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...

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...