In this working paper, Senior Research Fellow Jerry Brito and Andrew Perraut discuss the importance of mandatory transparency to improve performance in the public sector.

On February 13, 2009, President Obama signed into law the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), with the promise that this $787 billion stimulus would “create or save” 3.5 million jobs over the next two years, mostly in the private sector. The basis for the law was a study by Christina Romer, the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors, and Vice-President Biden’s chief economist Jared Bernstein, who warned that without an economic stimulus, unemployment would reach 9 percent by the end of 2010.

In this publication, Veronique de Rugy presents a case example of how government can link strategic risk management to resource allocation. Dr. de Rugy uses port security as an example of how strategic risk management can be used to analyze threats to the nation, develop scenarios, pose key questions, and develop resource allocation options. To illustrate the potential of strategic risk management, she presents three resource allocation options as to how the federal government might reallocate its present resources to more cost-effectively respond to security threats to the nation based on risk analysis.

In this Mercatus on Policy, Richard Williams and Katelyn Christ of the Mercatus Center discuss the dangers and shortfalls of excise taxes.

In this working paper, Senior Research Fellow Jerry Ellig shows that better GPRA reporting is correlated with greater availability and use of performance information.