Master Public Policy Analysis: Advanced

Explore the concept of policy as a moral and societal framework guiding decisions, distinguishing formal and informal policies, and analyzing outcomes to address wicked problems.

Examines when government intervention is warranted by analyzing market failure and redistribution, including negative externalities, monopolies, and missing markets, and shows how public goods and social services justify policy action.

Apply power analysis to map policy actors by power and interest, guiding tailored engagement: fully engage high power-high interest, inform low power-high interest, and monitor the rest.

Analyze supply and demand curves to change behaviors and incentives, applying taxes, subsidies, and price floors and price ceilings to smoking and market failures.

Examine policy problem of smoking in the United States, including deaths and lung cancer linked to tobacco, and the 17% of citizens who smoke, while exploring taxation and subsidy implications.

Explore how supply and demand curves model agent behavior, identify equilibrium as the most efficient price and quantity, and analyze price adjustments from taxes, subsidies, price ceilings, and price flaws.

The lecture shows how cigarette taxes shift the supply curve, raise price to 10, reduce quantity to 3, create government revenue, and introduce dead weight loss with changes in surpluses.

Subsidies shift the demand curve, raise quantity and price, reduce consumer surplus, and leave producers earning less as government support boosts vaccinations, health care, and other public goods consumption.

Explore how price ceilings and price floors reshape supply and demand, creating shortages and surpluses relative to equilibrium, with rent control and minimum wage as key examples.

Explore cost benefit analysis with a real world policy example, evaluating current and future costs against benefits to inform a government highway policy recommendation.

Master public policy analysis centers on cost benefit analysis, a numerical balance sheet of program strengths and weaknesses used to compare options, justify feasibility, and choose the best project.

Apply a cost-benefit analysis (CBA) to policy problem of whether a U.S. government agency should build a highway, weighing concrete, labor, and maintenance costs against time saved and lives saved.

Assess current costs using cash flow accounting, then compare social marginal costs in perfect versus imperfect markets, illustrating how a price floor creates opportunity costs and market leakages.

Explore measuring future costs by including maintenance and one-time construction costs using present discounted value. Apply opportunity cost and a 7% discount rate to estimate long-term project costs.

The lecture compares measuring highway benefits by time savings and lives saved, using contingent valuation and revealed preferences, while noting survey issues and ethical considerations.

Using a 7% discount rate, this cost-benefit analysis shows present costs of about $255.5 million versus discounted benefits of $1.14 billion, supporting a recommendation to build the highway.

Explore the policy matrix as a tool to compare policy alternatives by criteria, revealing tradeoffs, with both quantitative (numbers) and qualitative (subjective) tools for analyzing strengths and weaknesses.

Define the policy problem through data, literature, and expert framing; in NYC, high school graduation vs college readiness is measured by enrollment, graduation, cost, and demographics.

Apply a qualitative policy matrix to compare status quo and reform for NYC high school graduates to bridge 35% to 50% college readiness, considering biases, feasibility, costs, and family focus.

Assemble and organize diverse data to analyze policy problems, using surveys, focus groups, interviews, Google searches, and econometric models, and manage references with EndNote and Excel.

Explore how to use a quantitative policy matrix to compare tradeoffs across economic efficiency, equitable distribution, costs, and adoption, guiding policy recommendations.

Learn how to format a policy brief with a clear problem statement, evidence, and policy recommendations, illustrated by immigration policy analysis in South Africa and the United States.

I thank learners from diverse backgrounds for taking the course, share policy analyst experiences, invite outreach on udemy, and encourage exploring other courses for ongoing growth.