Journal of Policy Analysis and Management最新文献

{"title":"Officials’ Early Life Experience and Policymaking: The Enduring Impact of China's Great Famine on Government Objectives","authors":"Caiwen Hu,&nbsp;Zhenyu Wang","doi":"10.1002/pam.70076","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/pam.70076","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>This study examines how officials’ heterogeneous preferences, particularly shaped by traumatic childhood experiences, impact government policy decisions. Leveraging China's Great Famine as a natural experiment, we apply a cohort difference-in-differences (DID) approach to analyze the effect of officials’ exposure to famine on government objectives in their jurisdictions. Results show that famine-exposed officials, particularly those aged five or older during the crisis (a formative period for value formation), systematically set lower economic growth targets, reflecting trauma-induced risk aversion rather than diminished administrative capacity. Two key findings support this interpretation: (1) Jurisdictions led by famine-exposed officials achieve comparable economic outcomes, and (2) these officials allocate greater resources to social stability expenditures. The evidence highlights how early-life adversity embeds risk-averse heuristics in bureaucratic decision-making, with lasting implications for institutional governance.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":48105,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Policy Analysis and Management","volume":"45 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2025-12-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145824596","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"","authors":"","doi":"10.1002/pam.70079","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/pam.70079","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":48105,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Policy Analysis and Management","volume":"45 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2025-12-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145751056","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Notes from the Editor","authors":"","doi":"10.1002/pam.70081","DOIUrl":"10.1002/pam.70081","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":48105,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Policy Analysis and Management","volume":"45 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2025-12-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145717873","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"","authors":"","doi":"10.1002/pam.70073","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/pam.70073","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":48105,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Policy Analysis and Management","volume":"45 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2025-11-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145619272","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Broad-Based Categorical Eligibility Policy and SNAP Participation","authors":"Xingguo Wang,&nbsp;Pourya Valizadeh,&nbsp;Rodolfo M. Nayga Jr.,&nbsp;Henry L. Bryant,&nbsp;Bart L. Fischer","doi":"10.1002/pam.70063","DOIUrl":"10.1002/pam.70063","url":null,"abstract":"<p>The broad-based categorical eligibility (BBCE) policy allows states to bypass federal gross income and asset tests for supplemental nutrition assistance program (SNAP) eligibility. Policymakers often propose limiting BBCE's scope or eliminating it altogether. Yet, our understanding of BBCE's impact on SNAP participation has relied solely on static two-way fixed effects (TWFE) estimators, which have been criticized for assuming no treatment effect heterogeneity across states and over time. In this study, using a heterogeneity-robust difference-in-differences estimator, we provide new estimates of BBCE's impact that are more than twice as large as those derived from the static TWFE models. Importantly, our event-study analysis shows that BBCE's effect has increased uniformly over time across state groups defined by their adoption timing, explaining the smaller effects estimated by the static TWFE model. In addition, we find that although BBCE extended eligibility to higher-income households, most of its impact on participation occurred among households already eligible under federal gross income limits. Our counterfactual simulations further show that between 2000 and 2016, extending eligibility to higher-income households accounted for approximately 11.5% of the increase in participation and 3.8% of the rise in program spending resulting from BBCE, with the remainder driven by already income-eligible households.</p>","PeriodicalId":48105,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Policy Analysis and Management","volume":"45 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2025-11-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/pam.70063","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145485713","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Housing Quality Improvement and Health Care Utilization: A Regression Discontinuity Study","authors":"Kacie L. Dragan","doi":"10.1002/pam.70074","DOIUrl":"10.1002/pam.70074","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Low-income housing is often of substandard quality. Health care payers like Medicaid and Medicare are piloting reimbursement for housing quality improvement with the rationale of reducing expenses from acute care use, but little is known about whether housing quality interventions can alter health utilization. I evaluate a large-scale policy mandating remediation of NYC's worst buildings in a regression discontinuity design to estimate the causal effect of housing improvements on health utilization. I do not find evidence of impacts on any metric of short-run acute care use or health expenditures, even among vulnerable subgroups. Exploratory longer-run event studies show some evidence of moderate (10%–15%) reductions in emergency department visits 3–4 years later but no evidence of impacts on expenditures. The policy succeeded at reducing housing violation rates in treated buildings by half. Yet, this only corresponded to a move from the 98th percentile to the 96th percentile of all buildings, underscoring the dire conditions tenants continue to live in—and suggesting one potential explanation for muted findings on health care use. The theory that housing quality interventions can directly translate to reductions in health use and spending may not be borne out empirically, particularly if interventions cannot completely address substandard conditions.</p>","PeriodicalId":48105,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Policy Analysis and Management","volume":"45 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2025-11-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/pam.70074","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145485714","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Obtaining Comparable Measures of Organizational Performance: An Application to U.S. Federal Agencies, 2002–2024","authors":"George A. Krause,&nbsp;David E. Lewis","doi":"10.1002/pam.70064","DOIUrl":"10.1002/pam.70064","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Evaluating the comparative performance of U.S. federal agencies is difficult, particularly since both tasks and missions vary so dramatically. In addition, forces beyond an agency's control (e.g., COVID, an economic downturn, etc.) can determine outcomes even when agencies are performing at a high level. In this paper, we introduce a new approach to measuring organizational performance, something conceptually distinct from, but correlated with, both organizational inputs and outcomes. This measurement approach focuses on how well the internal machinery of agencies is functioning. We analyze a vast trove of subjective and objective performance information and aggregate it using a Bayesian structural equation measurement (BSEM) model. We isolate organizational performance from inputs and outcomes through careful model specification, information from the BSEM models, and model identification through a careful evaluation of different models and diagnostics. Our analysis yields 2479 organizational performance estimates for 135 U.S. federal departments and agencies spanning 19 years between 2002 and 2024. We explore the validity of these estimates by comparing them with other measures of similar or related concepts. We conclude by discussing the implications of our measurement approach and its usefulness for evaluating organizational performance in diverse and changing contexts.</p>","PeriodicalId":48105,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Policy Analysis and Management","volume":"45 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2025-11-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/pam.70064","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145472947","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Impact of Amazon Facilities on Local Economies","authors":"Vikram Pathania,&nbsp;Serguei Netessine","doi":"10.1002/pam.70065","DOIUrl":"10.1002/pam.70065","url":null,"abstract":"<p>A number of large companies deploy facilities—factories, warehouses, shopping malls—that employ thousands of people directly and indirectly. Local governments have been enticing these companies with various financial incentives. But how much economic growth do these facilities promote, if any? We study this question using Amazon distribution facilities as the case in point. We show evidence of a positive effect of opening Amazon's distribution facilities on counties' economic outcomes. We focus on midsized counties in which Amazon opened facilities in the years 2014–2017 because we have good controls for these counties. We find a selection effect where Amazon locates its facilities, and we address this issue. Our preferred methodology is Callaway–Sant'Anna difference-in-differences combined with matching. After Amazon's entry, in our preferred specification, we find that the employment-to-population ratio in the treated county increased by 0.0087 (+1.46% at the mean), the poverty rate decreased by 0.36 percentage points (−2.69%), and the median household income increased by $1413 (+2.33%). We present evidence to argue that our findings can likely be interpreted as causal and plausible.</p>","PeriodicalId":48105,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Policy Analysis and Management","volume":"45 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2025-11-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/pam.70065","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145472944","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Loopholes and the Incidence of Public Services: Evidence From Funding Career and Technical Education","authors":"Thomas Goldring,&nbsp;Brian A. Jacob,&nbsp;Daniel Kreisman,&nbsp;Michael David Ricks","doi":"10.1002/pam.70062","DOIUrl":"10.1002/pam.70062","url":null,"abstract":"<p>In 2015, Michigan increased its Career and Technical Education (CTE) funding and changed its funding formula to reimburse programs based on student progression through program curricula. Although this change nearly doubled program completion rates, student enrollment and persistence were unaffected; instead, administrators accelerated student progress by reorganizing course curricula around notches in the new funding formula. As a result of response heterogeneity, 30% of the funding increase was transferred away from high-poverty districts to more affluent ones, underscoring how supply-side responses to loopholes shape the incidence of public services.</p>","PeriodicalId":48105,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Policy Analysis and Management","volume":"45 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2025-11-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/pam.70062","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145472943","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Universal School Vouchers and Education Savings Accounts Are Good Policies","authors":"Patrick J. Wolf","doi":"10.1002/pam.70070","DOIUrl":"10.1002/pam.70070","url":null,"abstract":"&lt;p&gt;Private school choice is having a moment. After a slow start, voucher and Education Savings Account (ESA) programs experienced explosive growth in their numbers, geographic scope, and enrollments recently. Vermont and Maine established the first voucher programs in rural areas that lacked public schools in 1869 and 1873, respectively. They were the only private school choice initiatives in the United States until Wisconsin established the first modern voucher program in Milwaukee in 1990 (Witte and Wolf &lt;span&gt;2017&lt;/span&gt;). Ohio followed in 1995 with the Cleveland Scholarship and Tutoring Program. Arizona launched the first tax-credit-funded scholarship (voucher) program statewide in 1997 and followed with the first ESA program in 2011. By 2025, 35 states, plus DC and Puerto Rico, operated 70 tuition voucher or ESA programs serving over 1.2 million students.1&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Until 2022, eligibility for private school choice programs was targeted to students disadvantaged by disability, geography, or family income in all states. That year, Arizona expanded eligibility for its pioneering ESA initiative to every K–12 student in the Grand Canyon state. In the three short years since Arizona launched the first universal private school choice program, 16 other states have followed suit, including Idaho, Indiana, New Hampshire, Tennessee, Texas, and Wyoming in 2025 alone.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;On July 4, 2025, President Trump signed the &lt;i&gt;One Big Beautiful Bill Act&lt;/i&gt;, which includes a national voucher-type program that states can opt into beginning January 1, 2027. Private school choice programs initially were few, exclusively in the tuition voucher mold, and narrowly targeted. Now, choice programs are common throughout the country, often take the more flexible form of ESAs, and are either building toward or have reached universal eligibility.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is universal private school choice good policy? I think so. Levin (&lt;span&gt;2001&lt;/span&gt;, 9) argues that private school choice programs should be evaluated based on their effects on four key dimensions: expanding consumer choice, improving the productive efficiency of K–12 education, promoting equity, and advancing social cohesion. Here, I apply Levin's evaluative framework to the existing research on school choice. Although robust evidence on the effects of U.S. universal private school choice programs is just now emerging, we can draw inferences from studies of universal choice programs in other developed countries, evaluations of targeted U.S. programs, and descriptive data from new universal initiatives in the United States. These inferences are provisional, given the inherent uncertainty regarding how such policies will evolve.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Universal voucher and ESA programs expand consumer choice by allowing more parents to access the schools they prefer for their children. According to Morning Consult's recent polling, 36% of parents of school-age children would prefer a private school placement for their child, and 14% would like t","PeriodicalId":48105,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Policy Analysis and Management","volume":"45 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2025-10-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/pam.70070","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145397392","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}