The extraordinary growth of healthcare spending in the United States necessitates an incremental model of institutional change. Efforts to reduce social spending in the 1980s introduced strict cost controls on healthcare, yet this regulation was annually abated with temporary legislation known as “doc fixes.” We show that the institutions set up to control spending were slowly undermined through three mechanisms: the transformation of wider political and economic problems into technical ones, the “layering” effect of repeated budgetary appropriations, and the moral arguments that sustained incremental spending growth. This case illustrates how creative responses to budget constraints may produce incremental change, driven by ideas about how markets and welfare should work.
February 14, 2025
BESI Climate affiliated faculty member Ryan Brutger and Designated Emphasis in Political Economy student Daniel Lobo co-authored this article for the American Political Science Review, which reviews their survey of white and Black Americans on their attitudes toward trade.
December 22, 2025
Many countries assume that leading with subsidies ("carrots") reduces the need for punitive policies ("sticks") to achieve decarbonization goals. In this paper for Nature, co-authored by BESI Climate lead Jonas Meckling, the authors use an economic model that allows them to compare carrot- and stick-first policy decisions, finding that a carrot-first strategy still requires similar-sized sticks to a stick-first approach to achieve comparable levels of decarbonization.
November 18, 2025
In a November 2025 article for the journal Politics & Society, UC Berkeley Political Economy director and BESI steering committee member Steve Vogel argues that that economists should bring power into the heart of their analysis of wage formation.