Kurt Sather · v1.1.1 · 2026-07-19 · Proprietary — all rights reserved
The research paper states the measurement problem — five related gaps: institutional fragmentation, decision-to-outcome fragmentation, forecast-versus-observation confusion, aggregation without distribution, and false certainty — and grounds the GII-US answer in the potential-outcomes framework, modern staggered-treatment econometrics, composite-indicator practice, federal evidence standards, and legal measurement research.
Primary research question#
How can the material, institutional, legal, social, and economic effects of United States government decisions be measured over time and traced to their decision origins without collapsing uncertainty, distribution, and qualitatively different outcomes into a misleading single judgment?
Research propositions under test#
| # | Proposition |
|---|---|
| 1 | Lineage: cross-institution policy lineages explain observed effects more accurately than isolated document attribution. |
| 2 | Heterogeneity: national means materially understate variation across households, geographies, public bodies, nonprofits, industries, and firm sizes. |
| 3 | Forecast calibration: divergence between forecast and observed impact varies systematically by decision type, domain, and evidence maturity. |
| 4 | Implementation: legal effectiveness alone is an incomplete proxy for realized exposure and impact. |
| 5 | Measurement: a magnitude–direction–confidence scorecard is more stable and interpretable than a single positive/negative composite. |
| 6 | Revision: data vintages and legal-status changes materially affect a nontrivial share of early estimates. |