In 1986, a small group of public policy faculty gathered at Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, for a conference on what was then a novel enterprise in professional education for public service. The enterprise grew into the dozens of master's programs in policy analysis and management that now cover not only the United States but the globe, and on the twentieth anniversary of that influential meeting, APPAM organized a conference at Park City, Utah, where a much larger group of faculty gathered to reflect backward on how policy analysis education had evolved, and forward on where it should be going.The Park City conference was organized around a set of commissioned papers, each providing a starting point and common ground for discussion sessions that were in turn recorded by rapporteurs. Rapporteurs were asked to write essays capturing the most important themes of their sessions, not to merely transcribe the conversation, and they did so admirably.This completes the record of the conference, though it remains to thank its planning committee:
This paper develops and tests a theory of compliance costs. Tension between not complying, with a low probability of detection, and complying, incurring quite high time and money costs, should result in varied choices for a sample of small businesses but high costs per dollar of revenue for those that comply. Medium-sized businesses are likely to comply because many costs are invariant with respect to size, and because they are likely to be caught if they do not comply. Empirical tests of this theory for a Washington State small- and medium-sized business sample confirm that small businesses report higher mean costs, but have greater variability across firms, than medium-sized businesses.
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