JPAM's Closer Look

JPAM's Closer Look is the author-interview podcast of the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, produced in conjunction with American University's School of Public Affairs. Seth Gershenson of American University hosts. His guests are researchers who have published in the journal, and each conversation is built around their study. The stated remit is wide: healthcare, education, environmental policy, immigration reform, economics and more. The episode list shows the spread, with titles on deterring crime in New York, a Maryland grow-your-own teacher program, Washington state's cannabis taxes, disability insurance, center-based child care and juvenile justice referrals. What a listener gets is the inside of a study. On the New York State Gun Violence Reduction Project, a guest explains a focused deterrence intervention carried out across five sites in New York State in 2013 and 2014, aimed at recently paroled people convicted of violent or gun crimes. The treatment was deliberately light-touch: a single one-hour evening notification forum, attended as a condition of parole. The appeal, as the conversation frames it, is cost, since a cheap intervention that also has an effect could pay off well for society. The cannabis conversation shows how policy details get locked in. Details of a passed Washington ballot initiative cannot be changed for two years, so the market opened under a tiered tax that market participants later called overly burdensome. A reform then replaced it with a single retail excise tax that was meant to be revenue neutral. Other conversations turn to institutions and the people who run them. A discussion of disability insurance looks at the assessors who judge what work a person could still do after a disability. It also covers why mental health conditions are especially hard to weigh when medical questionnaires and job descriptions say little about them. The guests on that episode are affiliated with VU Amsterdam, the Erasmus School of Economics and the Tinbergen Institute. The juvenile justice episode puts numbers on disengagement. There, a guest reports that referring a student's first infraction to juvenile justice adds about 2.6 absences on average, roughly 14 percent of the way to chronic absenteeism, and says the results fit the school-to-prison pipeline model rather well. Gershenson's questions go to research design. In the child care conversation he asks whether an added month of enrollment or any exposure at all is the right treatment to study. The guest explains why months in care serves as the primary measure when families use child care so unevenly. The Teacher Academy of Maryland conversation brings wage effects into a debate about declining interest in teaching, a debate the guest says leans on descriptive evidence and anecdotes more than causal research. The tone is collegial throughout. For a listener who wants to know how a policy finding was produced, and not only what it was, the show goes straight to the researchers who produced it.