Three public opinion studies examined public attitudes toward prevalence reduction (PR; reducing the number of people engaging in an activity) and harm reduction (HR; reducing the harm associated with an activity) across a wide variety of domains. Studies 1 and 2 were telephone surveys of California adults’ views on PR and HR strategies for a wide range of risk domains (heroin, alcoholism, tobacco, skateboarding, teen sex, illegal immigration, air pollution, and fast food). ‘‘Moral outrage’’ items (immoral, disgusting, irresponsible, dangerous) predicted preference for PR over HR, with disgust the most important predictor. In contrast, preferences were not predicted by whether the risk behavior was common, no one else’s business, or harmless. Study 3 explored whether there are domains where liberals might reject HR. A sample of liberal students preferred HR[PR for heroin, but PR[HR for ritual female circumcision; path analysis suggested that this reversal was explained by moral outrage rather than consequentialist judgments of harm to self and harm to others.

Labor supply theory makes strong predictions about how the introduction or expansion of a social welfare program impacts work effort. Although there is a large literature on the work incentive effects of AFDC and the EITC, relatively little is known about the work incentive effects of the Food Stamp Program and none of the existing literature is based on quasi-experimental methods. We use the cross-county introduction of the program in the 1960s and 1970s to estimate the impact of the program on the extensive and intensive margins of labor supply, earnings, and family cash income. Consistent with theory, we find reductions in employment and hours worked when food stamps are introduced. The reductions are concentrated among families headed by single woman.

Aims - No modern jurisdiction has ever legalized commercial production, distribution and possession of cannabis for recreational purposes. This paper presents insights about the effect of legalization on production costs and consumption and highlights important design choices.

Methods -  Insights were uncovered through our analysis of recent legalization proposals in California. The effect on the cost of producing cannabis is largely based on existing estimates of current wholesale prices, current costs of producing cannabis and other legal agricultural goods, and the type(s) of production that will be permitted. The effect on consumption is based on production costs, regulatory regime, tax rate, price elasticity of demand, shape of the demand curve and non-price effects (e.g. change in stigma).

Results - Removing prohibitions on producing and distributing cannabis will dramatically reduce wholesale prices. The effect on consumption and tax revenues will depend on many design choices, including: the tax level, whether there is an incentive for a continued black market, whether to tax and/or regulate cannabinoid levels, whether there are allowances for home cultivation, whether advertising is restricted, and how the regulatory system is designed and adjusted.

Conclusions - The legal production costs of cannabis will be dramatically below current wholesale prices, enough so that taxes and regulation will be insufficient to raise retail price to prohibition levels. We expect legalization will increase consumption substantially, but the size of the increase is uncertain since it depends on design choices and the unknown shape of the cannabis demand curve.

Many tools that are helpful for evaluating emissions mitigation measures, such as carbon abatement cost curves, focus exclusively on cost and emissions reduction potential without quantifying the direct and indirect impacts on stakeholders. The impacts of climate change will be the most severe and immediate for billions of poor people, especially for those whose livelihoods are based on agriculture and subsistence activities and are directly dependent on weather patterns. Thus, equity and vulnerability considerations must be central to GHG emissions reduction strategies. A case study of a carbon abatement cost curve for an electricity system in two Nicaraguan rural villages is presented and is complemented with assessments based on the poverty metrics of the poverty headcount, the Gini coefficient, and the Kuznets ratios. Although these metrics are relatively easy to calculate, the study provides a general indication as to how the social impacts of mitigation strategies on the poor (whether they are in rural or urban environments, developed or developing countries) can be revealed and highlights the inequalities that are embedded in them. Further work analysing how mitigation measures affect the various more detailed poverty indices, such as the Human Development, Gender Equality, or Multidimensional Poverty indices, is needed.

Eighty percent of American cities today hold their general elections on different days than state and national elections. It is an established fact that voter turnout in these off-cycle local elections is far lower than turnout in local elections held concurrently with state and national elections. In this paper, I demonstrate that the timing of city elections has been an important determinant of voter turnout since before the Civil War. By examining three large American cities over the course of the nineteenth century, I find that American political parties regularly manipulated the timing of city elections to secure an edge over their rivals. I show that the decisions to change the election dates of these cities were contentious, partisan, and motivated by an expectation of subsequent electoral gain. The Progressive municipal reformers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries continued in this tradition when they separated city elections from state and national elections, and the local election schedule they implemented has largely persisted until today.

Social influence rises with the number of influence sources, but the proposed relationship varies across theories, situations, and research paradigms. To clarify this relationship, I argue that people share some sense of where the “burden of social proof” lies in situations where opinions or choices are in conflict. This suggests a family of models sharing 2 key parameters, one corresponding to the location of the influence threshold, and the other reflecting its clarity—a factor that explains why discrete “tipping points” are not observed more frequently. The plausibility and implications of this account are examined using Monte Carlo and cellular automata simulations and the relative fit of competing models across classic data sets in the conformity, group deliberation, and social diffusion literatures.

In the wake of the Cold War era, America’s research universities became increasingly characterized by a tribal mentality among schools and departments, and disciplines. The surge in research funding, and the tremendous growth rate among the major public universities in particular, fostered the idea of the “multiversity” was becoming less communal, and less aware of the collective purpose. These patterns have accelerated considerably over the past two decades in the US that reflect three relatively new realities or influences: a) within the public university sector, decreasing public subsidies have influenced a movement toward internal management decisions and organizations that have eroded a previous model of revenue sharing (in tuition and fees, in overhead generated by extramural research, for example) to profit, loss, and prestige centers; b) this has been accompanied and reinforced by the concept that there are different market opportunities among different schools, departments, disciplines and their degrees, and hence opportunity costs (in the tuition price of an MBA versus and English PhD, for example) in which high income units should retain and spend those monies. These influences are common in various degrees globally but from different source. In much of the world, including Europe, the demands and edicts of ministries and evolving concepts of faculty as civil servants heavily influence organizational behavior. In the US, the decrease in public investment is driving internal behaviors shaped as well by the interests of faculty, the increasing global nature of knowledge production, and market opportunities that differ among the disciplines. This paper explores the development and impact of these various influences on research intensive universities, with the theme that the internal concept of the university is rapidly changing, influencing the behavior of academic leaders and faculty, the organization of the post-modern university, the flow of funds, and ultimately the perceived and real role of the research university in society. Past observers of the life and times on universities have described aspects of this shift as a movement from a larger sense of a university community among faculty to a tribal mentality. But the current shift extends well the weakening of disciplines and departments, beyond faculty as individual actors to the internal organization of the academy and a relatively new concept of profit and loss centers. This shift toward what I call “University Devolution” or fragmentation is influenced by the external political, social, and economic world. In Europe and elsewhere, neo-liberal ministries wield great power and have helped pushed universities toward this model. In the US, it remains largely a phenomenon influenced by reduced government investment yet ultimately driven by internal decision-making related to privatization – thus far. The paper ends with a brief discussion on whether the organizational behaviors in US research universities are reflective of global trends, or are in some aspects unique.