The federal government sponsors hundreds of programs designed to solve some of America's toughest challenges. The most important question facing policymakers and agency leadership is this: what public policies and programs work?

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One of the main criticisms of experimental evaluations is that they are conducted under such special circumstances that their results may not apply to other people, places, or times. A new wave of experimental evaluations is changing that.

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The World Health Organization's Pandemic Influenza Preparedness Framework seems to have all of the right elements: It calls for sharing influenza viruses, surveillance, stockpiles of medicines and vaccines, and more. Yet it rests on shaky footing.

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During a recent keynote presentation at the Innovation in Infectious Diseases Research symposium, I gave the following challenge: To really translate research to public health action, we need to understand what meaningful collaboration looks like.

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The federal government runs two programs to help poorer Americans feed their families. Evidence shows that if getting poor households to eat more healthy foods is a major policy goal, we should seriously consider limiting choice in food assistance.-

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I advocate using randomized experiments because they provide a high level of confidence in the results. But they aren't always possible or appropriate. So what criteria should researchers use to decide when to use them?

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Abt evaluation experts Stephen Bell and Laura Peck examine concerns about social experiments and provide ways to avoid common pitfalls.

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A theme of the "New Management" is to better measure government performance and, in particular, the performance of individual workers. However, one must carefully weigh the costs and benefits of performance measurement.

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Can researchers give policymakers the right information about what is and is not working for the nation as a whole, especially when research is limited to select pockets of the country? This is not as impossible as it sounds.

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Abt evaluation experts are engaged in discussions to advance the leading edge of evaluation methods. Recently, Laura Peck and Allan Porowski shared insights on the American Evaluation Association blog AEA365.

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