Public Policy and Statistics: Case Studies from RAND [Hardcover]

A critical yet constructive description of the rich analytical techniques and substantive applications that typify how statistical thinking has been applied at the RAND Corporation over the past two decades. Case studies of public policy problems are useful for teaching because they are familiar: almost everyone knows something abut health insurance, global warming, and capital punishment, to name but a few of the applications covered in this casebook. Each case study has a common format that describes the policy questions, the statistical questions, and the successful and the unsuccessful analytic strategies. Readers should be familiar with basic statistical concepts including sampling and regression. While designed for statistics courses in areas ranging from economics to health policy to the law at both the advanced undergraduate and graduate levels, empirical researchers and policy-makers will also find this casebook informative.How to Apply Statistics to Public Policy Problems.- Challenges in Designing and Analyzing Social Experiments: School-Based Drug Prevention.- The Health Insurance Experiment Design with the Finite Selection Model.- Sampling Difficult Populations.- Developing and Applying Effective Data Graphics: Supply Delays for F-14 Jet Engine Repair Parts.- Is There Periodicity in the Global Mean Temperature Series?- Assessing the Statistical Evidence of Racial Bias in Capital Cases.- Are Impaired Physicians More Malpractice-Prone?- Comparing Hospital Mortality Rates: Adjusting For Casemix and Sample Size.- Reconciling Eye Care Provider Supply and Demand.- Evaluating Block Grant Formulae: Estimating the Need for Substance Abuse Treatment by State. I strongly recommend it as a source to instructors in statistics. Its breadth of applications and its organization of topics within the papers make the book an important contribution to the growing collection of books on case studies in statistics.
R.W. Oldford in Short Books Reviews , Voll+