Inclusionary Housing After Koontz

Abstract

Inclusionary housing requirements, typically determined locally, have met with mixed success in the courts. After the U.S. Supreme Court's recent decision in Koontz v. St. Johns River Water Management District (Koontz), many are wondering if they have become harder to defend.     

Pain Management and Work Capacity: Evidence From Workers’ Compensation and Marijuana Legalization

We study whether the work capacity of the older working population responds to improved pain management therapy access. We use the adoption of state recreational marijuana laws (RMLs) as a large policy shock to access to a non-pharmaceutical pain management option. We focus on workers’ compensation cash benefit receipt as a measure of work capacity, finding that receipt declines in response to RML adoption. Workers’ compensation cash benefits are awarded to workers who require time away from work to recover from an injury, which arguably captures a policy-relevant aspect of work capacity. We observe similar shifts in complementary proxies for work capacity, including work-limiting disability rates. After considering a range of alternative mechanisms, the evidence suggests that the primary driver of the reductions in workers’ compensation benefits is improvements in work capacity.     

Autonomy, consent and persuasion

In this article the author considers whether healthcare professionals should be under a legal duty to persuade their patients to change their minds when they have made an apparently irrational decision.     

Mugabe at war: The political economy of conflict in Zimbabwe

This paper employs a 'political economy of conflict' approach to explore the recent deterioration in the governance of Zimbabwe. It argues that this analytical approach, which has been applied by scholars such as William Reno to highly dysfunctional and/or collapsed states like Liberia and Sierra Leone, is appropriate for understanding the current actions of the Zimbabwean government as well, and especially their relation to the military's unpopular intervention in the recent conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. While Zimbabwe's current crisis has been aptly described by various scholars as a failure of leadership, this paper argues that such failures of national governments in Africa need to be understood within the broader context of international political economy. Zimbabwe's lapses in governance extend beyond the state and the national border to features that have non-state and informal as well as international and transnational dimensions.