Policy Implementation: A Behavioral Economics Perspective

• In Event: Predictable Patterns: An Approach to Bridging Policy-Implementations Gaps in Service of Educational Equity

Abstract

Objective
Policymakers and researchers working in a number of arenas of public policy-- including international development and poverty (e.g., Mullainathan, 2011), education (e.g., Dynarski & Scott-Clayton, 2006; Castleman & Page, 2014; Lavecchia et al., 2014), healthcare (e.g., Roberto & Kawachi, 2015; Rice, 2013), and retirement (e.g., Thaler & Benartzi, 2004)-- have developed policy solutions that draw on insights from behavioral economics. This subfield of economic theory draws on psychological aspects of human behavior to map the bounds of rationality (Camerer et al., 2004; Kahneman, 2011). In this paper, I discuss these insights and their application to the implementation of educational equity policy.

Theoretical Framework and Methods
The paper comes from a comprehensive review of ideas from behavioral economics applied to policy problems across social policy fields. I also draw on Ray’s (2019) ideas about the importance of taking a race-explicit approach to organizational and policy studies. The cases to which I apply the data come from significant original empirical analyses of implementation of school choice and teacher hiring policies (Author, 2016, 2019).

Results
Behavioral economics shows that actors respond to policies in “predictably irrational” ways (Ariely, 2009), with implications for policy implementation. For example, simple “nudges” and reminders (Thaler & Sunstein, 2008), targeted and simplified information (Hastings et al., 2007), and default options (Thaler & Benartzi, 2004) can have significant impacts on behavior, encouraging greater participation or follow-through in policies or programs that have been found to benefit not just the target population but also the broader society. These insights help us to understand the specific ways in which people will respond to policies and how the places, or contexts, of decisions can influence those responses. In taking a race-explicit approach to these ideas, we can see how implementers’ choice patterns are driven in part by implementers’ positionality as well as constraints imposed by racist practices historically embedded in school systems.

Significance
This paper helps economists and non-economists alike draw on analytical tools from the subfield of behavioral economics to predict and explain implementation outcomes. I extend the field of behavioral economics in education by illuminating the utility of taking a race-explicit approach.

Author

• Huriya Jabbar, University of Southern California