By Stuart Shapiro
Upon its inception in April 2021, the New Jersey State Policy Lab (NJSPL) aspired to produce work that is both relevant to current policy issues in the state of New Jersey and academically rigorous. The evidence that we have had success in the first of these missions includes the twice weekly blogs and the many reports that the lab has produced.
As for producing academically rigorous work, our strategy has been to fund the many brilliant scholars around the state to conduct research on policy questions within their area of expertise. Recently we were very happy to partner with the Journal of Policy Studies to highlight some of the studies produced by the Policy Lab in a special issue.
Executive Director of the NJSPL, Elizabeth Cooner, Ciera Gather, and I wrote the introduction to the issue. We highlight the academic literature on policy labs and how they have had to make choices regarding their focus, their approach to research, and how they position themselves in the policy ecosystems of their states. We then describe the choices that the NJSPL made on these dimensions and how those choices have both influenced policy and led to the work featured in the special issue.
There are six articles (besides our introduction) in the special issue, and they cover the gamut of policy areas emphasized by NJSPL. I will briefly describe them and link to them here and urge you to check them out!
The NJSPL, has focused much attention on education policy and disparities in educational opportunities. Dr. Vandeen Campbell examines those disparities in the context of the paths toward STEM education and finds how decisions as early as middle school led to wide disparities later on.
Dr. Michael Hayes and Prakash Kandel look at the legalization of cannabis in New Jersey and find that less affluent towns were more likely to allow cannabis businesses, particularly if other towns nearby had done so. They also found that home sale prices increase more in towns that make the decision to allow such businesses.
Younes, Noland, Iacobucci, and Zhang examine the newly crucial issue of who is working from home. The COVID-19 pandemic first forced many businesses and employees to figure out remote work and then convinced those same businesses and employees that such an arrangement had mutual benefits. They find that more affluent and educated workers are more likely to continue working at home, potentially introducing further economic disparities and holding implications for transportation systems and economic activity.
Rubin, Bartle, and Willoughby ask what budget actions have been undertaken by U.S. state and local governments to structure taxing and spending and to advance social equity goals, and they use their findings to make recommendation on how better to incorporate equity in budgeting.
The final two articles focus on the use of technology in government to improve service delivery. Dr. Seulki Lee-Geiller reports on the results of a survey in New Jersey on e-government effectiveness, trust in the state government, and digital literacy. In their article, Astudillo-Rodas, Hetling, and Venancio-Rodriguez examine an effort in New Jersey to use swipe cards to record attendance for childcare subsidies. Conceived as an approach for reducing burdens, the swipe cards have actually imposed psychological costs and have not functioned as intended.
Collectively, these works demonstrate the breadth and depth of work being conducted with the support of the NJSPL.