Overview

Public servants face a challenging task. They are asked to provide public goods and services as efficiently as possible. But in order to achieve that goal, they need to know how much social value will be produced for any given dollar of public investment, across the alternative policy choices.  

The information our public servants actually possess typically falls far short of that standard. As a result, public investments are often made without good information about the likely returns on those investments.  

To address this challenge, the Policy Impacts team at MIT has developed a standardized metric, the Marginal Value of Public Funds (MVPF), that reports the net social benefit produced by each additional dollar of public funds spent on a given policy. Yet we currently lack MVPF estimates for many policy alternatives, including most criminal justice policies.

The Policy ROI Project, made possible by the support of Arnold Ventures, aims to close this knowledge gap for criminal justice policies. The Policy ROI Project will produce MVPF estimates of the net social returns to alternative criminal justice investments, including summer youth employment and cognitive behavioral therapy programs. The project team will work closely with practitioners to ensure that these estimates help policymakers make better informed decisions about how to achieve more public safety with fewer taxpayer dollars. 

To reach the project team, please email roiproject@ssrc.org.