The dark side of price cap regulation: a laboratory experiment

In a nutshell, price cap regulation is meant to establish a quid pro quo: regulators are obliged by law to intervene only at rare, previously defined points in time, and only by imposing an upper bound on prices; firms are meant to justify regulatory restraint by adopting socially beneficial innovations. In the policy debate, a potential downside of the arrangement has featured less prominently: the economic environment is unlikely to be stable while the cap is in place. If regulators take this into account, they have to decide under uncertainty and also anticipate how regulated firms will react. In a lab experiment, we manipulate the degree of regulatory uncertainty. We compare a baseline when regulators have the same information as firms about demand with treatments wherein they receive only a noisy signal and another when they know only the distribution from which demand realizations are taken. In the face of uncertainty, regulators impose overly generous price caps, which firms exploit. In the experiment, the social damage is severe, and does not disappear with experience.     

Using the Results from Rigorous Multisite Evaluations to Inform Local Policy Decisions

Evidence‐based policy at the local level requires predicting the impact of an intervention to inform whether it should be adopted. Increasingly, local policymakers have access to published research evaluating the effectiveness of policy interventions from national research clearinghouses that review and disseminate evidence from program evaluations. Through these evaluations, local policymakers have a wealth of evidence describing what works, but not necessarily where. Multisite evaluations may produce unbiased estimates of the average impact of an intervention in the study sample and still produce inaccurate predictions of the impact for localities outside the sample for two reasons: (1) the impact of the intervention may vary across localities, and (2) the evaluation estimate is subject to sampling error. Unfortunately, there is relatively little evidence on how much the impacts of policy interventions vary from one locality to another and almost no evidence on the implications of this variation for the accuracy with which the local impact of adopting an intervention can be predicted using findings from an evaluation in other localities. In this paper, we present a set of methods for quantifying the accuracy of the local predictions that can be obtained using the results of multisite randomized trials and for assessing the likelihood that prediction errors will lead to errors in local policy decisions. We demonstrate these methods using three evaluations of educational interventions, providing the first empirical evidence of the ability to use multisite evaluations to predict impacts in individual localities—i.e., the ability of “evidence‐based policy” to improve local policy.     

Differentiation of epithelial cell types by cell diameter

Genital swabs play an important role in cases of alleged sexual assault. The aim of our study was to see if epithelial cells from the vagina, glans penis, or mouth could be distinguished on the basis of size. Vaginal swabs were taken from 12 women in different phases of their menstrual cycles; penile swabs were taken from 5 men, and mouth swabs were taken from 6 men and 6 women. For each swab, a sample was smeared across a microscope slide and allowed to dry. The dried epithelial samples were then viewed without any further processing with a "SteReoLumar.V12" stereo microscope. The microscope slide surfaces were divided into grids and all single epithelial cells whose contours could be clearly distinguished were photographed. The maximum diameter for each photographed cell was digitally determined using the Axiovision software. In total, 995 vaginal epithelial cells, 211 penile epithelial cells, 329 male oral epithelial cells, and 525 female oral epithelial cells were measured. Menstrual cycle phase did not affect vaginal epithelial cell diameter. The mean vaginal epithelial cell diameter was 63.95 microm (min. = 28.08 microm, max. = 108.06 microm, s = 11.50 microm). The mean penile epithelial cell diameter was 39.24 microm (min. = 28.38 microm, max. = 51.02 microm, s = 4.84 microm). The diameter of oral epithelial cells hardly differed for both sexes, although the female cells were, on the whole, slightly larger. On the basis of these results, it is not possible to conclude that epithelial cells of less than a certain diameter found in the assessment of a vaginal swab must be of penile origin. It is also not possible to usefully distinguish vaginal epithelial cells from male or female oral epithelial cells on the basis of the diameter. However, finding epithelial cells with a diameter distinctly greater than 50 microm in a penile swab sample suggests the presence of vaginal or oral epithelial cells. Epithelial cells examined with the presented method can be used without restrictions for further examinations, such as single-cell DNA analysis after single-cell picking with the micromanipulator developed by Aura Optik (Jena).