Public policy is an institutionalized proposal or a decided set of elements like laws, regulations, guidelines, and actions to solve or address relevant and real-world problems, guided by a conception and often implemented by programs. These policies govern and include various aspects of life such as education, health care, employment, finance, economics, transportation, and all over elements of society. The implementation of public policy is known as public administration. Public policy can be considered to be the sum of a government's direct and indirect activities and has been conceptualized in a variety of ways.
Public administration, or public policy and administration is the collective process through which public policy is created and implemented. It is also the subfield of political science that studies policy processes and the structures, functions, and behavior of public institutions and their relationships with a broader society. Public administration students generally take up employment across the public sector and non-profit civic sector, but also have opportunities to work in the for-profit private sector, especially in roles related to civil service, think tanks, politics, government relations and lobbying, public relations, regulatory affairs and regulatory compliance, consulting, trade associations, corporate social responsibility (CSR), environmental, social, and governance (ESG), public procurement (PP), public-private partnerships (P3), and business-to-government marketing/sales (B2G).
Field experiments are experiments carried out outside of laboratory settings.
Campbell's law is an adage developed by Donald T. Campbell, a psychologist and social scientist who often wrote about research methodology, which states:
The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.
Based on a long-standing research program of the World Bank, the Worldwide Governance Indicators capture six key dimensions of governance between 1996 and present. They measure the quality of governance in over 200 countries, based on close to 40 data sources produced by over 30 organizations worldwide and are updated annually since 2002.
In statistics, econometrics, political science, epidemiology, and related disciplines, a regression discontinuity design (RDD) is a quasi-experimental pretest–posttest design that aims to determine the causal effects of interventions by assigning a cutoff or threshold above or below which an intervention is assigned. By comparing observations lying closely on either side of the threshold, it is possible to estimate the average treatment effect in environments in which randomisation is unfeasible. However, it remains impossible to make true causal inference with this method alone, as it does not automatically reject causal effects by any potential confounding variable. First applied by Donald Thistlethwaite and Donald Campbell (1960) to the evaluation of scholarship programs, the RDD has become increasingly popular in recent years. Recent study comparisons of randomised controlled trials (RCTs) and RDDs have empirically demonstrated the internal validity of the design.
Civil service reform is a deliberate action to improve the efficiency, effectiveness, professionalism, representativity and democratic character of a civil service, with a view to promoting better delivery of public goods and services, with increased accountability. Such actions can include data gathering and analysis, organizational restructuring, improving human resource management and training, enhancing pay and benefits while assuring sustainability under overall fiscal constraints, and strengthening measures for performance management, public participation, transparency, and combating corruption.
Iulie Margrethe Nicolaysen Aslaksen is a Norwegian economist and Senior Researcher at Statistics Norway. She was a member of the Petroleum Price Board from 1990 to 2000. She is an expert on energy and environmental economics, including petroleum economics, climate policy and economics and sustainable development. She is cand.oecon. from the University of Oslo in 1981 and dr.polit. from 1990. She has been a visiting researcher and Fulbright Fellow at Harvard University and the University of California, Berkeley, and Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Oslo. She was a member of the government commissions resulting in the Norwegian Official Report 1988:21 Norsk økonomi i forandring and the Norwegian Official Report 1999:11 Analyse av investeringsutviklingen på kontinentalsokkelen.
David L. Weisburd, is an Israeli/American criminologist who is well known for his research on crime and place, policing and white collar crime. Weisburd was the 2010 recipient of the prestigious Stockholm Prize in Criminology, and was awarded the Israel Prize in Social Work and Criminological Research in 2015, considered the state's highest honor. Weisburd is Distinguished Professor of Criminology, Law and Society at George Mason University. and Walter E. Meyer Professor Emeritus of Law and Criminal Justice in the Institute of Criminology of the Hebrew University Faculty of Law. At George Mason University, Weisburd was founder of the Center for Evidence-Based Crime Policy and is now its Executive Director. Weisburd also serves as Chief Science Advisor at the National Policing Institute in Washington, D.C. Weisburd was the founding editor of the Journal of Experimental Criminology, and is editor of the Cambridge Elements in Criminology Series.
Jens Otto Ludwig is a University of Chicago economist whose research focuses on social policy, particularly urban issues such as poverty, crime, and education. He is McCormick Foundation Professor of Social Service Administration, Law, and Public Policy in the School of Social Service Administration and Harris School of Public Policy Studies at the University of Chicago, where he also serves as Co-Director of the university's Urban Education and Crime Labs.
Naila Kabeer is an Indian-born British Bangladeshi social economist, research fellow, writer and Professor at the London School of Economics. She was also president of the International Association for Feminist Economics (IAFFE) from 2018 to 2019. She is on the editorial committee of journals such as Feminist Economist, Development and Change, Gender and Development, Third World Quarterly and the Canadian Journal of Development Studies. She works primarily on poverty, gender and social policy issues. Her research interests include gender, poverty, social exclusion, labour markets and livelihoods, social protection, focused on South and South East Asia.
Marianne Bertrand is a Belgian economist who currently works as Chris P. Dialynas Distinguished Service Professor of Economics and Willard Graham Faculty Scholar at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business. Bertrand belongs to the world's most prominent labour economists in terms of research, and has been awarded the 2004 Elaine Bennett Research Prize and the 2012 Sherwin Rosen Prize for Outstanding Contributions in the Field of Labor Economics. She is a research fellow of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and the IZA Institute of Labor Economics.
David McKenzie is a lead economist at the World Bank's Development Research Group, Finance and Private Sector Development Unit in Washington, D.C. His research topics include migration, microenterprises, and methodology for use with developing country data.
Yana van der Meulen Rodgers is a professor in the Department of Labor Studies and Employment Relations in the School of Management and Labor Relations at Rutgers University,. She also serves as Faculty Director of the Center for Women and Work at Rutgers.
Sanjiv M. Ravi Kanbur, is T.H. Lee Professor of World Affairs, International Professor of Applied Economics, and Professor of Economics at Cornell University. He worked for the World Bank for almost two decades and was the director of the World Development Report.
Helen Zerlina Margetts, is Professor of Internet and Society at the Oxford Internet Institute (OII), University of Oxford and from 2011 to 2018 was Director of the OII. She is currently Director of the Public Policy Programme at The Alan Turing Institute. She is a political scientist specialising in digital era governance and politics, and has published over a hundred books, journal articles and research reports in this field.
Helen F. Ladd is an education economist who currently works as the Susan B. King Professor Emeritus of Public Policy and Economics at Duke University's Sanford School of Public Policy. In recognition of her research on the economics of education, she has been elected to the National Academy for Education and the National Academy of Sciences.
Anya Samek is an American economist who works in the fields of applied economics, behavioral economics, experimental economics, and strategy. She is currently an associate professor of economics at the Rady School of Management at the University of California, San Diego.
Dina Deborah Pomeranz is a Swiss economist who is currently an assistant professor of applied economics at the University of Zürich. Pomeranz is considered to be one of the most influential Swiss economists.
Claire L. Felbinger was an American political scientist and public administration expert. She specialized in program evaluation, and conducted some of the first research on the administration and evaluation of public works initiatives. She was the chair of the Department of Public Administration at American University, a program officer at the Transportation Research Board, and a senior research associate at the Japan International Transport Institute.
