Good Text Book on Public Policy

Section I:  What Is Public Policy?

Chapter 1:  Public Decision Making
Chapter 2:  Why Is It So Hard to Make the World a Better Place?


Section II:  Why We Do What We Do

Chapter 3:  Understanding Individual Behavior:  Rational Man and Woman
Chapter 4:  Understanding Group Behavior:  Collective Action        
Chapter 5:  Evaluating Social Welfare


Section III:  Markets and Government

Chapter 6:  The Political Process
Chapter 7:  The Market System
Chapter 8:  The Role of Government


Section IV: Tools for Analysis

Chapter 9:  Gathering and Measuring Information
Chapter 10:  Basic Data Analysis
Chapter 11:  Introduction to Regression Analysis
Chapter 12:  Benefit-Cost Analysis
Chapter 13:  Program Evaluation


Section V:  Making Policy

Chapter 14:  The Role of Institutions
Chapter 15:  Policy Design

Introduction to Public Policy by Charles Wheelan

The Oxford Handbook of Health Economics

1. Overview , Peter Smith and Sherry Glied

The Organization of Health Care Systems

2. Health Systems in Industrialized Countries , Bianca K. Frogner, Peter S. Hussey, and Gerard F. Anderson

3. Health Systems in Low and Middle Income Countries , Anne Mills

4. The Political Economy of Health Care , Carolyn Tuohy and Sherry Glied

5. The Promise of Health: Evidence of the Impact of Health on Income and Well-Being , William Jack

Determinants of Health

6. Health Production , Kristian Bolin

7. Socioeconomic Status and Health: Dimensions and Mechanisms , David M. Cutler, Adriana Lleras-Muney, and Tom Vogl

8. Determinants of Health in Childhood , Michael Baker and Mark Stabile

9. Economics of Infectious Diseases , Ramanan Laxminarayan and Anup Malani

10. Economics of Health Behaviours and Addictions: Contemporary Issues and Policy Implications , Donald S. Kenkel and Jody Sindelar

11. Economic and Mental Health: An International Perspective , Richard G. Frank

Institutions of Health Care Finance

12. Public Sector Health Care Financing , Ake Blomqvist

13. Voluntary Private Health Insurance , Peter Zweifel

14. Health Care Cost Growth , Michael E. Chernew and Dustin May

15. User Charges , Erik Schokkaert and Carine Van de Voorde

Economic Problems of Health Care Finance

16. Insurance and the Demand for Medical Care , Mark V. Pauly

17. Guaranteed Access to Affordable Coverage in Individual Health Insurance Markets , Wynand P.M.M. van de Ven and Frederik T. Schut

18. Managed Care , Laurence Baker

The Institutions of Health Care Supply

19. Hospitals: Teaming Up , Pedro Pita Barros and Pau Olivella

20. Primary Care , Anthony Scott and Stephen Jan

21. The Global Health Workforce , Till Barnighausen and David E. Bloom

22. The Economics of the Biopharmaceutical Industry , Patricia M. Danzon

23. Disease Prevention, Health Care and Economics , Jane Hall

24. Long-Term Care , Jose-Luis Fernandez, Julien Forder and Martin Knapp

Economic Problems of Health Care Supply

25. Physician Agency and Payment for Primary Medical Care , Thomas G. McGuire

26. Provider Payment and Incentives , Jon B. Christianson and Douglas Conrad

27. Non-Price Rationing and Waiting Times , Tor Iversen and Luigi Siciliani

28. Increasing Competition between Providers in Health Care Markets: The Economic Evidence , Carol Propper and George Leckie

Assessing Performance

29. Measuring Organisational Performance , Jim Burgess and Andrew Street

30. Health System Productivity , Jack E. Triplett

31. The Methods of Cost-Effectiveness Analysis to Inform Decisions about the Use of Health Care Interventions and Programmes , Simon Walker, Mark Sculpher and Mike Drummond

32. Analysing Uncertainty in Cost-effectiveness for Decision Making , Susan Griffin and Karl Claxton

33. Health Utility Measurement , Donna Rowen and John Brazier

Economic Perspectives on Fairness

34. Concepts of Equity and Fairness in Health and Health Care , Jan Abel Olsen

35. Measuring Inequality and Inequity in Health and Health Care , Eddy van Doorslaer and Tom Van Ourti

36. Intergenerational Aspects of Health Care , Louise Sheiner

Economic Methodology and Health Policy

37. Econometric Evaluation of Health Policies , Andrew M. Jones and Nigel Rice

38. Health Economics and Policy: The Challenges of Proselytising , Alan K. Maynard and Karen Bloor

Better Know Your Baselines

Why baselines are important;

Baselines are essentially the status quo, the starting point for whatever fiscal discussion you're having, and help show the change certain policies might have on the federal budget. However, as TaxVox, the Tax Policy Center's blog, pointed out in a great post last year, not everyone uses the same baseline, and some baselines are better than others

Assorted

NGO Sustainability Index

Uses and Abuses of Governance Indicators

Measuring Democracy

A Users Guide to Measuring Corruption

You Too Can Fix the Budget

Budget Puzzle: You Fix the Budget

O.K., You Fix the Budget

Random Course

Public Economics- from MIT OpenCourseWare

Public Debt - the very basics

Why Our Current Budget Situation Is a Crisis;

In short, there is no precedent for reducing the ratio of debt to GDP by simply growing our way out of it. Instead, policy choices must be made in order to restore a primary surplus.

U.S Government Debt Since World War II;

My reading of this history is that one should not be optimistic that we can simply shrink the ratio of debt/GDP by growing the denominator. A lot of the reduction that took place between 1947 and 2000 was due to running primary surpluses. If we are going to do that again, we will have to do so in spite of the fact that military spending is a much smaller share of GDP (so that arithmetically there is less room to cut) and in spite of the way that Social Security and Medicare are going to be affected by demographics and health care spending trends.

Assorted- Bend it like Becker and others

Living on a Budget;

The grocery market in the United States accounts for more than 25 percent of all retail sales, totaling hundreds of billions of dollars. The last decade has seen important transformations in the market structure of this industry with non-traditional retailers such as Walmart and Costco accounting for more than 30 percent of total grocery sales. For any given product, the spread of consumer prices from different retailers is orders of magnitude larger than price fluctuations from changing world food market conditions. The average consumer faces prices that differ by more than 20 percent across stores in the same area.

The National Broadband Plan

Growth Policy- Paul Romer

The economist manifesto

Bend it like Becker

Angus Maddison, Economic Historian, Dies at 83

The Trouble With Rankings

Economics Uncut-A Complete Guide to Life, Death and Misadventure

Yuan to fight about it? The WTO legality of China’s exchange regime

Back to Basics- Personal Income Tax

Figure 1 Basic Income: Flat Tax

Figure 2 The Government's Budget Constraint

Figure 3 Optimal Tax Rate

Figure 4 Maximum Tax Rate

Figure 5 Marginal Tax Rate on Top Income

For the Student- Personal Income Taxation: From Theory to Policy;

The main change in the approach to taxation came from the later integration of public finance into the general area of welfare economics, which was itself a major concomitant of the successful introduction of a utility-maximising approach to exchange in the 1870s. However, the most systematic early developments came from Cohen-Stuart in 1889 (Cohen-Stuart 1958) and Edgeworth (1897) in investigating the broad implications for progressivity of the minimisation of total disutility from taxation—ignoring any possible benefits. With the criterion of minimising total sacrifice, progression arises from decreasing marginal utility, but with equal absolute sacrifice, it depends on the precise behaviour of the marginal utility of income. Even here, there was no explicit independent role for redistribution: the maximand was strictly considered to be total utility.

This movement reached its ultimate conclusion in the 'optimal tax' literature, beginning virtually a century after the initial introduction of a utility analysis into economics. The mathematical analyses of Edgeworth were extended by allowing, in particular, for labour supply incentive effects of taxes and transfers, and including a range of specifications of the objectives of taxation, thus introducing an explicit redistributive role.8 In this final development, most of the important criteria suggested by Smith and others were ignored. The relevant branch of welfare economics into which optimal tax theory falls is the theory of the 'second best', in view of the fact that the government is unable to tax individuals' endowments of ability and instead taxes their incomes. Sometimes, stress is placed on asymmetric information aspects, in that the government cannot observe ability levels

Assorted

The Physics of Curling

What’s Wrong with the Obama Job Loss Graphic?

Keep testing the kids

Welcoming the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform

The simple money supply multiplier model and simple keynesian multiplier model

Using Simple Statistics to Detect Cheating

How to write an essay

CPI + Velocity = Trouble

Beauty’s Daughter

Another Practitioner- Rakesh Mohan's Eichengreen challenge

Monetary Policy in a Globalized Economy- A Practitioner's View

Rakesh Mohan

Ashok Mody review;

In a recent comment, Barry Eichengreen (2009) says that economists are subject to fads and trends because the penalties for departing from social norms are large. Hence, even though the tools and perspectives to question the prevailing normative view are available, the incentives to adopt them are minimal...

Rakesh Mohan sees such pragmatism as the key role of a practising economist. It is in the practice of economics that the rubber, so to speak, hits the road, the theories are tested, the validity of parameters is assessed, and the cold reality of politics is faced. He speaks of the recurring conflicts in objectives faced by policymakers. In resolving these conflicts, he questions and prods, often pushing back on views widely held by academic and other practising economists. In his practice, Mohan reports, the Eichengreen challenge was always present. But because the risk of being marginalised is high, bucking the orthodoxy requires clarity of perspective and determined persistence. Both of these are amply in view in this book, which brings the speeches Mohan delivered as deputy governor of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) from the early years of this decade, along with an extensive introduction and an “after word” that reports on the ongoing global financial and economic crisis...

For students of the Indian economy who also seek a special understanding of India’s monetary and financial policies, this book will be an invaluable guide. It presents a careful and current account of developments with an analytical eye, placed in the context and language of ongoing international policy debates. For readers seeking to assess the pulse and rhythm of India’s ginger steps from the safety of domestic finance to the choppier waters of international finance, the book offers a calibrated prognosis.

Assorted

Landsburg's Heroes of All Time

66 percent of the time

And it also occurred me that while students see the professor while he or she is teaching, they only witness about 66% of what goes into teaching.

Medical Statistics Don't Always Mean What They Seem to Mean

Paul Romer's Errors

Experiments in industrial policy

As much as fixed costs matter, the real barrier to firm growth in poor countries could be management. A good manager is partly one with training, experience, and a sense of best practice. A lot of a factory’s success comes down to management as a technology, though. Organizing a production floor, ensuring quality and efficient production: these are less a product of a single manager’s talent and more the product of decades of trial and error in manufacturing plants around the world. The problem: if you are running a firm in India or Mexico or elsewhere, the best practices probably haven’t filtered through.

2009 Quality of Life Index

Balance of Payments

A Primer on Complexity

It's a complex world we live in.

F & D is out

Finance and Development June 2009

Assorted

Swine flu: why does it take so long to make a vaccine?

Cloud Computing

White House Launches ‘Open Government Initiative’

Sunday Function

How Pigs Replaced Economics


The IS curve

That Freshman Course Won’t Be Quite the Same

The problem with economists;

Incorporating the factors that created problems in the financial markets makes the theory complex. But to be effective in the real world, to be able to communicate economic ideas, you have to simplify. Sometimes, you start believing your simplifications as if they were the general theory.

An Economist Tries to Defend His Profession--and Fails

Foreclosures and Modifications for Beginners

Idiots Guide to the US Budget System

The Budget System and Concepts

Budget Reform Proposals

And more by Peter R. Orszag

Assorted

Why did the U.S. Housing go bust in 2006-07?;

There are essentially five theoretical models or frameworks that are used by economists to explain credit booms and busts. These are (1) changes in fundamentals over time; (2) irrational myopia as reflected in euphoric greed followed by fear or depressive panic; (3) implicit or explicit government subsidies and guarantees; (4) multiple equilibria or knife-edge problem; and (5) agency problems in assets management. Each of these frameworks is used to analyze the current housing problems, which triggered a U.S. financial meltdown and impacted a global economic crisis.

Banking and the Leverage Ratio

NIPFP-DEA Program on Capital Flows

India Financial Sector Self Assessment

FinancialStability.gov

Please torch my car

Structured Finance for Beginners

Credit Default Swaps, Herald of Doom (for Beginners)

Assorted

What is up with the balance of payments?

The Fed's new balance sheet

A reporter’s budget mistake at the press conference

Now the Long Run Looks Riskier, Too as

Why Good Economics Works for Everyone

A View from the Outside; Why Good Economics Works for Everyone, by Minister P. Chidambaram

Initial Lessons of the Financial Crisis- IMF

• Not all booms are alikeWhat may matter is not so much the asset price boom in itself, but who holds the assets and the risk, how the boom is financed, and how an eventual bust may affect financial institutions. The degree of leverage associated with the funding of a boom and the degree of involvement of banks and other financial intermediaries will determine the magnitude of balance sheet effects and the dangers to the supply of credit in a bust.

• The case for policy intervention depends on how a boom is financed and how risk is held. Asset price booms supported through leveraged financing and involving financial intermediaries should be dealt with, since they entail risks for the supply of credit to the economy; other booms could more likely be left to themselves.

• The mandate of monetary policy should include macro-financial stability, not just price stability. To the extent that the build up of systemic risk can portend a sharp economic downturn, and to the extent that regulation cannot fully prevent such a buildup, it is now clear that policy makers cannot neglect asset-price and credit booms. That said, prudential measures provide a more targeted and less costly policy solution than interest rate changes and should be a central element of an integrated policy response

• The crisis also highlights two important lessons for fiscal policy. The first is that, in many countries, budget deficits were not reduced sufficiently during the boom years when revenues were high, which limits the fiscal space needed to fight the crisis. The second has to do with the structure of taxation. In most countries, the tax system is biased toward debt financing through deductibility of interest payments. This bias to higher leverage increases the vulnerability of the private sector to shocks, and should be eliminated.

-IMF Executive Board Discusses "Initial Lessons of the Crisis"


Initial Lessons of the Crisis
Initial Lessons of the Crisis for the Global Architecture and the IMF
Lessons of the Global Crisis for Macroeconomic Policy

Lessons of the Financial Crisis for Future Regulation of Financial Institutions and Markets and for Liquidity Management

Video
Press Briefing on Lessons of the Financial Crisis, IMF