Are public managers more risk averse? Framing effects and status quo bias across the sectors

The article of record as published may be found at https://doi.org/10.30636/jbpa.21.3Modern reforms meant to incentivize public managers to be more innovative and accepting of risk are often implicitly based in the longstanding assumption that public employees are more risk averse than their private sector counterparts. We argue, however, that there is more to learn about the degree to which public and private managers differ in terms of risk aversion. In order to address this gap, we field a series of previously validated experiments designed to assess framing effects and status quo bias in a sample of public and private sector managers. Our results indicate that public managers are not more risk averse or anchored to the status quo than their private sector counterparts; in fact, the findings suggest the opposite may be true under some conditions. In addition, our results fail to confirm previous findings in the literature suggesting that public service motivation is associated with risk aversion. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of these results for the study of risky choice in the public sector and for modern public management reforms

Fiscal Federalism and Tax Effort in the American States

In the 25 years following the Second World War, state governments doubled the amount of inflation adjusted revenue that they collected in taxes. That represented a growth rate more than double that of the federal government (see Maxwell 1972). On average, the increase in state tax effort flattened out markedly by the 1980s, but there has been tremendous variation in the degree to which individual states have raised or lowered the tax burden on citizens over the last four decades. This study argues that federalism, and particularly the grant-in-aid system, influenced state budgetary decision-making and ultimately tax levels within recipient jurisdictions over the past 40 years.Includes bibliographical reference

It's good for students when parents work with teachers to design and produce their education.

The New York City Department of Education has long recognized the role of parent involvement in student academic achievement. Indeed, parents and teachers can work together to 'coproduce' educational services to benefit student achievement. However, we do not know what kind of coproduction directly and effectively supports educational attainment. In a new research, Julio Zambrano-Gutiérrez, Amanda Rutherford, and Sean Nicholson-Crotty ..

The stages of nonprofit advocacy

This dissertation argues that advocacy is a two-stage decision in which organizations must first decide whether or not to undertake political activity through advocacy or lobbying and then choose between the set of strategic actions that, based on available financial and human resources, are available to them. These are separate decisions with separate constraints. The decision to advocate is a strategic stance taken by nonprofit organizations in policy environments that necessitate such activity and in which it is politically conducive for them to undertake the cost of such actions. Once an organization has decided that it will undertake advocacy activities, it must determine the specific activities, collaboration, grassroots advocacy, or direct lobbying, that will help it to pursue that course most effectively. These hypotheses are tested in an analysis of the advocacy activities of over 500 nonprofit reproductive health service providers. Data for this study were gathered from the National Center for Charitable Statistics within the Urban Institute and directly from IRS Form 990s filed by the organizations. The findings suggest that there are strong and consistent relationships between policy and politics and the political activity of nonprofit service providers. In states with more restrictive reproductive health policy environments, nonprofit organizations that provide these services are more likely to engage in advocacy activity. The findings also suggest that, even when controlling for the policy environment, 501(c)(3)s are more likely to become politically active in states where they have a larger number of political allies. Additional analyses suggest that there is a negative relationship between government monies and the aggressiveness of advocacy and the use of multiple advocacy strategies. Interestingly, this finding is consistent with the expectations offered in the resource dependence literature and the results suggest only a tenuous relationship between institutional variables and decisions regarding organizational aggressiveness in the choice of advocacy strategies

How looking only at policy diffusion "successes" between states may be misleading

Ideas often have a way of spreading. This is certainly true in the case of American states; innovative policies are often adopted by others in a process known as policy diffusion. But in trying to determine which policies spread, could we be giving too much of a focus on those that are successful? In new research which examines interstate compacts, Andrew Karch, Sean C. Nicholson-Crotty, Neal D. Woods, and Ann O’M. Bowman find that an emphasis on successful policies may be leading scholars to overestimate the importance of some factors, such as neighboring state activity, and underestimate the importance of others, like the number of previous adopters

Identifying Biomarkers from Transcriptomic Signatures in Renal Allograft Biopsies Using Deceased and Living Donors.

The survival of transplant kidneys using deceased donors (DD) is inferior to living donors (LD). In this study, we conducted a whole-transcriptome expression analysis of 24 human kidney biopsies paired at 30 minutes and 3 months post-transplantation using DD and LD. The transcriptome profile was found significantly different between two time points regardless of donor types. There were 446 differentially expressed genes (DEGs) between DD and LD at 30 minutes and 146 DEGs at 3 months, with 25 genes common to both time points. These DEGs reflected donor injury and acute immune responses associated with inflammation and cell death as early as at 30 minutes, which could be a precious window of potential intervention. DEGs at 3 months mainly represented the changes of adaptive immunity, immunosuppressive treatment, remodeling or fibrosis via different networks and signaling pathways. The expression levels of 20 highly DEGs involved in kidney diseases and 10 genes dysregulated at 30 minutes were found correlated with renal function and histology at 12 months, suggesting they could be potential biomarkers. These genes were further validated by quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qPCR) in 24 samples analysed by microarray, as well as in a validation cohort of 33 time point unpaired allograft biopsies. This analysis revealed that SERPINA3, SLPI and CBF were up-regulated at 30 minutes in DD compared to LD, while FTCD and TASPN7 were up-regulated at both time points. At 3 months, SERPINA3 was up-regulated in LD, but down-regulated in DD, with increased VCAN and TIMP1, and decreased FOS, in both donors. Taken together, divergent transcriptomic signatures between DD and LD, and changed by the time post-transplantation, might contribute to different allograft survival of two type kidney donors. Some DEGs including FTCD and TASPN7 could be novel biomarkers not only for timely diagnosis, but also for early precise genetic intervention at donor preservation, implantation and post-transplantation, in particular to effectively improve the quality and survival of DD

Findings from Year Two of the External Evaluation of the Healthy & Active Communities Initiative

The Missouri Foundation for Health has funded 33 projects under its Healthy & Active Communities (H&AC) Initiative in two-year funding cycles. A set of 15 projects was funded beginning in 2005 while a set of 18 was funded starting in 2006. This report is the second of three annual reports that assess the extent to which the H&AC Initiative is achieving its objectives. The report builds upon the findings described in “Findings from Year One of the External Evaluation of the Healthy & Active Communities Initiative.” The Missouri Foundation for Health contracted with the Institute of Public Policy, Truman School of Public Affairs at the University of Missouri to provide an evaluation of the success of the Initiative as a whole. This focus differs from the typical evaluation where evaluators are assessing and reporting on the success of individual funded projects. Instead, the evaluation looked across the funded projects to identify common factors of success. Continuing from the framework established in 2006, the evaluation team worked from a socio-ecological model. This model assumes that complex prevention programs such as the H&AC projects must use a multi-faceted approach in order to change behavior on individual, organizational and community levels simultaneously. To evaluate programs with multiple approaches such as these, the evaluators determined that cluster evaluation, a strategy developed by the Kellogg Foundation, could be used to identify successful features of the Initiative as a whole. This method enables the evaluators to identify successful program and community conditions that transcend the individual projects

Municipal performance: does mayoral quality matter?

This research addresses the question of what explains municipal performance in terms of delivering social services and fiscal performance. While the existing literature explains governmental performance with political, institutional and socio-demographic factors, I suggest that the greatest influence on municipal performance comes from having qualified managers. Specifically, I argue that that mayoral qualifications influence municipal performance. By qualifications I mean mayors’ human capital, that is, their educational and job-related experience. The rationale for my proposition rests on the fact that in developing municipalities the mayor is not just the elected leader but also the public manager, as s/he performs not just political but also administrative functions. Under certain circumstances, however, mayoral qualifications may not have the same influential power on municipal performance. Therefore, I also argue that in unfavorable municipal contexts, the potential influence of mayoral qualifications on performance decreases. I use both statistical and survey-experimental methodologies to test the hypotheses derived from the proposed “mayoral quality theory.” I collected six years of data for the statistical analyses by doing field research across the 40 municipalities that comprise the Colombian Department of Norte of Santander. For the surveyexperimental analysis, I gathered data from interviews and surveys with 120 mayors from 12 Latin American countries, who participated in the II Latin American Congress of Cities and Local Governments held in Cali, Colombia, on July 26-29, 2006. The statistical findings reveal that mayoral qualifications—education and jobrelated experience—positively influence municipal performance with respect to education enrollment, tax property collection, and social program investment. However, the positive impact that mayoral qualifications have on such performance indicators decreases under external constraints, such as the presence of illegal armed groups. From the survey-experimental study, findings show that issue salience (or nature of municipal need) moderates the impact that mayoral qualifications have on mayors’ decision-making. In education issues, for example, qualified mayors are more likely to perform better, while in infrastructure issues they are less likely to do so

Theoretical frontiers in representative bureaucracy: new directions for research

The notion of a representative bureaucracy has generated a great deal of research although many issues are yet to be resolved and some have not been addressed. This theoretical essay uses a contingency theory approach to address a set of key questions relevant to representative bureaucracy. It discusses who is represented and what values get represented at the aggregate level, why bureaucrats represent, who they represent, and which bureaucrats represent at the individual level, and the empirical issues of critical mass, intersectionality, and how representation might change as a minority becomes a majority. The essay proposes 15 testable hypotheses and four modeling recommendations for empirical analysis

Punctuated Equilibrium Theory and the Diffusion of Innovations

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/90322/1/j.1541-0072.2011.00437.x.pd