Adverse Effects Of Policies Research Articles

Applicability of Artificial Societies to Evaluate Health Care Policies.

We propose the use of artificial societies to support health care policymakers in understanding and forecasting the impact and adverse effects of policies. Artificial societies extend the agent-based modeling paradigm using social science research to allow integrating the human component. We simulate individuals as socially capable software agents with their individual parameters in their situated environment including social networks. We describe the application of our method to better understand policy effects on the opioid crisis in Washington, DC, as an example. We document how to initialize the agent population with a mix of empiric and synthetic data, calibrate the model, and make forecasts of possible developments. The simulation forecasts a rise in opioid-related deaths as they were observed during the pandemic. This article demonstrates how to take human aspects into account when evaluating health care policies.

A framework for evaluating geographic disparities in energy transition vulnerability

The path towards decarbonization promises many societal benefits such as reduced greenhouse gas emissions and new technological innovation. The adverse effects of policies that are helping to facilitate the energy transition, such as price spikes or job displacement, however, are not evenly spread across the population, and some individuals and communities are more vulnerable to possible adverse impacts than others. Here, we adapt a framework for conceptualizing vulnerability from the climate change adaptation literature to the energy context. We construct the dimensions of the framework, provide an illustration using the case of the renewable portfolio standard, generate a vulnerability score measure and map vulnerability across US counties. Our analysis shows that this framework can be used to identify geographical disparities, and should be further developed in future research to provide deeper insights about a just transition. Positive and negative impacts of energy transitions will not be evenly distributed. In this Perspective, the authors present a framework to map geographic variation in vulnerability from energy policies that can be built on in future work to support just policy-making.

Private Equity in Clean Technology: An Exploratory Study of the Finance-Innovation-Policy Nexus

The role of technological innovation in mitigating climate change has received growing interest in recent years. However, extant literature has neglected a more holistic view on equity financing and the indirect effects of innovation and financial policy on financing innovation through private equity (PE) and venture capital (VC). In this paper, we emphasize the importance of this understudied aspect through a comparative case study of private equity and venture capital for clean technologies in the United States and Germany. We find that systemic interdependencies between institutional investors, PE/ VC and policy makers influence the conditions for innovation – the “finance-innovation-policy nexus”. Adverse effects of policies affecting financial markets, in particular institutional investors, have to be taken into account to effectively mobilize private investments for (cleantech) innovation.

Structural Power and Public Policy: A Signaling Model of Business Lobbying in Democratic Capitalism

This paper develops a signaling model of corporate lobbying in democratic capitalist societies to analyze the conditions that lead to a powerful political position of business. Proceeding from the traditional dichotomy of structural economic determinants versus business' political action, our model predicts the conditions under which elected political decisionmakers modify their policy pledges to accommodate business' political preferences, or override business' lobbying messages and honor their pledges. Our results show that the structural power of business over public policy is contingent on two variables: the size of reputation costs of business in relation to its material costs of lobbying; and the ratio of the policymaker's reputation constraints from policy commitments and campaign pledges to the electoral costs arising from adverse effects of policy. We evaluate our model using case studies of business lobbying on environmental and financial services regulation in Britain and Germany.