Search
Conduct a general search, select a content type, or navigate to specialized search pages: Courses, Faculty, News, Publications, and Capstone Projects.
News
Paul Light and Paul Volcker Explore Federal Government "Breakdowns"Paulette Goddard Professor of Public Service Paul Light of NYU Wagner released on December 11 an issue paper he wrote on the “cascade” of Federal government breakdowns and what can be done about it. He appeared with former Federal Reserve Board Chairman …
Publication
Specialization in Relational Reasoning: The Efficiency, Accuracy, and Neural Substrates of Social versus Nonsocial InferencesAlthough deduction can be applied both to associations between nonsocial objects and to social relationships among people, the authors hypothesize that social targets elicit specialized cognitive mechanisms that facilitate inferences about social …
Publication
The Spiral of Nonprofit Excellence… through five landings, or stops, along the climb: (1) the organic phase of life, in which they struggle to …
Publication
Practical propensity score matchingThis paper discusses propensity score matching in the context of Smith and Todd's (Does matching overcome Lalonde's critique of nonexperimental estimators, J. Econom., in (press) reanalysis of Dehejia and Wahba (J. Am. Statist. Assoc. 97 (1999) 1053; …
Publication
Child labor: The role of income variablity and access to credit in a cross section of countriesEven though access to credit is central to child labor theoretically, little work has been done to assess its importance empirically. Dehejia and Gatti examine the link between access to credit and child labor at a cross-country level. The authors measure …
Publication
Disaster in Context: The Effects of 9/11 on Youth Distant from the AttacksAlthough an increasing amount of community mental health research has investigated the deleterious effects of disasters and the targeting and efficacy of treatment in their aftermath, little research has sought to identify preexisting characteristics of …
Publication
Understanding the Political Context of "New " Policy Issues: The Use of the Advocacy Coalition Framework in the Case of Expanded After-School ProgramsThis article uses the Advocacy Coalition Framework to identify the stakeholders and their coalitions in the arena of after-school policy, which drew much new attention beginning in the early 1990s in many American cities. Using evidence from case studies …
Publication
Revising the Senior Walking Environmental Assessment ToolBACKGROUND: The Senior Walking Environmental Assessment Tool (SWEAT), an instrument for measuring built environmental features associated with physical activity of older adults, was revised to create an easier-to-use tool for use by practitioners and …
Publication
Making the connections: community capacity for tobacco control in an urban African American communityDeveloping community capacity to improve health is a cornerstone of community-based public health. The concept of community capacity reflects numerous facets and dimensions of community life and can have different meanings in different contexts. This …
Publication
"Understanding the Political Context of 'New' Policy Issues: The Use of the Advocacy Coalition Framework in the Case of Expanded After-School Programs"This article uses the Advocacy Coalition Framework to identify the stakeholders and their coalitions in the arena of after-school policy, which drew much new attention beginning in the early 1990s in many American cities. Using evidence from case studies …
Publication
School Efficiency and Student Sub-groups: Is a Good School Good for Everyone?State and federal accountability reforms are putting considerable pressure on schools to increase the achievement of historically low-performing groups of students and to close test score gaps. In this article, we exploit the differences among the large …
Publication
Bringing Information Technology to InfrastructureOver the last decade, the development and operation of conventional infrastructure, such as transportation, water and power systems, has increasingly become dependent on information technologies (IT). Due to the rapid rate of advances in IT, especially …
Publication
Leadership (Re)constructed: How Lens MattersThis paper develops a view of leadership as a social construct, as something that is created through dialogue among groups of people in a particular context. Different contexts allow us to see how leadership emerges in action. We further develop the idea …
Publication
School Finance Court Cases and Disparate Racial Impact: The Contribution of Statistical Analysis in New YorkAlthough analyses of state school finance systems rarely focus on the distribution of funds to students of different races, the advent of racial discrimination as an issue in school finance court cases may change that situation. In this article, we …
Publication
Distinguishing Good Schools from Bad in Principle and Practice: A Comparison of Four MethodsFor over a decade, perhaps no other issue in education has generated the same level of debate and policy activity as school accountability. At their most basic, accountability policies tie school rewards and sanctions to measures of school performance, …
Publication
Performance Evaluation, Public Management Improvement and Democractic Accountability: Some Lessons from Latin AmericaThe results-oriented management reforms fostered by the New Public Management movement are often argued to emphasize the search for efficiency, quality and other typical market values at the expense of democratic accountability. On the other hand, …
Publication
Intradistrict Equity of Public Education Resources and PerformanceThis paper presents empirical evidence on input and output equity of expenditures, teacher resources, and performance across 840 elementary and middle schools in New York City. Historically, researchers have studied interdistrict distributions, but given …
Publication
School Budgeting and School Performance: The Impact of New York City’s Performance Driven Budgeting InitiativePerformance Driven Budgeting (PDB) is a school-based budgeting initiative that was instituted in a select group of New York City schools beginning in the 1997-1998 school year. This paper analyzes the impact of the initiative on student test scores in the …
Publication
Pension Reform and Self-Employment in Latin AmericaPublic pension systems in Latin America have historically suffered from low coverage, with a relatively small percentage of the labor force eligible for benefits in retirement. In recent years, many governments have implemented reforms aimed at expanding …
Alumni In Action
Carolyn GormanWhy did you choose NYU Wagner for graduate school? I’ve always been interested in public policy, particularly related to health and labor. For a long time, though, I didn't know how I wanted to work on those issues-- meaning, in what capacity or role. It …
Capstone Projects
Developing a Risk Extraction and Information Control Method and Visualizing Industry Risk DataGrant Thornton is the American member firm of Grant Thornton International, one of the world’s leading audit, tax, and advisory services firms. The firm’s Business Risk Advisory Services department developed a new risk assessment approach that aligns risk …
Capstone Projects
ANALYZING SUBNATIONAL GOVERNANCE OF RENEWABLE ENERGY POLICIES IN MEXICOThe World Bank Group’s Governance Global Practice supports client countries by helping them build capable, efficient, transparent, inclusive, and accountable institutions with the aim of eradicating extreme poverty and boosting shared prosperity. To …
Capstone Projects
REDUCING GUN VIOLENCE WITH A COMMUNITY REVITALIZATION PROGRAMTrenton, New Jersey has faced a major uptick in gun violence in recent years, particularly among the city’s youth, and the COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated the social, economic, and health issues behind it. The Trenton Mayor’s Office engaged a Capstone …
Capstone Projects
SUCCESSFUL ESTABLISHMENT OF A NEWLY-FORMED NONPROFITAttachment and Biobehavioral Catch-up (ABC) is a Delaware-based nonprofit organization that disseminates a worldwide parenting program fostering strong, healthy relationships in families with infants or toddlers facing adversity. As ABC establishes itself …