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Bedrosian Faculty at APPAM

Published by Aubrey Hicks on

Center Director, Raphael Bostic and Bedrosian Faculty Affiliates, Elizabeth Graddy, Pamela McCann, Juliet Musso, William Resh, and Christopher Weare among others, are presenting at this year’s Association for Public Policy Analysis and Managment (APPAM) Fall Conference in Albuquerque, NM this week.

_I4C4792Raphael Bostic will be participating in the following roundtables:

The Civil Rights Act and War on Poverty: 50 Years Later

Can Distressed Neighborhoods be Saved? Evidence from the Neighborhood Stabilization Program

Racial Wealth Disparities & Housing Policy

Raphael Bostic will be presenting in the following panels:

Housing Vouchers: Neighborhood Access and Location Decisions

Measuring the Effects of Residential Segregation on Minority Outcomes

Sustainable Homeownership: Lessons from the Recent Crisis

Elizabeth Graddy will chair the panel: An Exploration of Policy and Program Termination

pmccannPamela McCann will be presenting a paper:

Innovation Choices and Diffusion Patterns

Abstract: How and when do political actors make policy choices in a complex world? More specifically, when do state political actors decide their status quo fails to meet their needs and then reformulate their policy? When is this change linked to what other states have done and which states provide valuable information? The purpose of this paper is to compare and contrast mimicry and learning and then assess the usefulness of one existing model of innovation choices based upon learning for deriving empirically testable hypotheses about state policy innovation and diffusion patterns. The empirical implications of the formal model and limitations are also considered.

Juliet Mussomusso_1 will be presenting on the Local Government Structure and Finance panel.

Juliet Musso will be presenting the following papers:

Partnerships or Privatization: The Determinants of Volunteer Use in Municipal Service Delivery

This paper analyzes the political and economic determinants of volunteer use among local municipalities in California with the aim of exploring the two faces of co-production: partnership and privatization (Bovaird, 2006; 2007). Co-production as partnership aims to engage citizens to build civic culture and enhance services through incorporation of local knowledge. Co-production as privatization tends to be undertaken more in the interest of cost-reduction through the shifting of responsibilities from paid staff (Ferris 1984). Critics of the latter suggest that this shift in responsibilities may come at the price of diminished professionalism, or mask service reductions or load shedding undertaken for political reasons (Percy 1984; Matson 1986).

From Performance Measurement to Performance Budgeting: Does Increased Accountability Pay Off?

As Behn (2003) has pointed out, systems for measuring performance in the public sector can be designed to further a variety of goals. These purposes can be scaled conceptually in terms of the degree of accountability they impose on public managers. For example, the use of performance measures to celebrate exemplary workers or to promote departmental activities does little directly to increase accountability relative to the utilization of performance measures for resource allocation. The development of performance measurement systems often involves movement from simple measurement toward incorporation of higher-level accountability regimes. The implicit assumption is that the net benefits of performance measurement increase monotonically with increased levels of accountability.

This paper examines this assumption in greater detail, illustrating some of the tradeoffs in performance measurement design with case analysis from historical and current trials of performance budgeting in California. In theory, increasing the stakes connected to performance measures should improve effectiveness, increase efficiency, and reduce financial waste. At the same time the costs of the performance measurement are also likely to increase. For example, incentives for the strategic manipulation of information asymmetries increase when there are higher stakes, which in turn increases costs for data verification and auditing. Also, possible gains from coordinated or cooperative behavior may be lost when stakes are high, encouraging organizational sub-units to maximize their own performance at the cost of collaboration. The question is whether the net benefits of performance measurement are maximized at a stringent level at which budgets are directly tied to performance measures.

William ReshResh_William will be presenting a paper:

The Persistence of Work Efforts as a Function of Public Service Motivation and Mission Match

Abstract: While both extrinsic and intrinsic motivations are expected to drive work effort (with a host of varying moderators), advancements in public management research have identified “public service motivation” (PSM) as a common characteristic of individuals who choose to enter careers in public or nonprofit service, separable from narrow policy advocacy or self-interested work motivations. In this research note, we test the notion that individuals with higher PSM and who identify more highly with the missions of the organizations for which they perform are more likely to persist in their work efforts in the face of “failure.” In other words, we are interested in whether PSM is a durable trait—one that leads to persistent effort in an environment of negative feedback. We feel that the findings from this research have implications for understanding how to better shape public and nonprofit sector recruitment, retention, and personnel policies. Moreover, it offers a set of propositions that have not been tested and does so using a novel platform for running natural ?eld experiments in studies of work motivation and economic behavior.

And here is a special Thursday photo of Bill … click here.

DA2_7184Christopher Weare will be presenting on the following panels:

Regulatory and Contractual Oversight: Ethics, Transparency and Accountability

What Does Government Performance Mean and How Do We Know? Different Perspectives

 

 

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