Justin B. Bullock

Attitudes About Hard Work: A Global Perspective on the Beliefs of Government Employees

ABSTRACT Government workers are often criticized for holding views that are at odds with the mainstream. Few studies have empirically tested the congruency between attitudes held by government and private sector workers. Using data from the 2009 International Social Survey Programme that includes individual responses across 32 countries, we examine whether government employees’ beliefs about opportunities in society systematically differ from those of private sector workers. We estimate the effect of sector (government/private) and position (supervisor/non-supervisor), among workers in “helping professions,” on perceptions of the role of hard work for getting ahead in society. We find that government supervisors and government/private non-supervisors are significantly less likely than private sector supervisors to emphasize the role of hard work for getting ahead. Private sector supervisors believe that hard work is essential for getting ahead. Government workers are less likely to emphasize the importance of hard work and are more inclined to look beyond the individual for explanations of societal success and failure.

The differential effect of compensation structures on the likelihood that firms accept new patients by insurance type

Adequate access to primary care is not universally achieved in many countries, including the United States, particularly for vulnerable populations. In this paper we use multiple years of the U.S.-based Community Tracking Survey to examine whether a variety of physician compensation structures chosen by practices influence the likelihood that the practice takes new patients from a variety of different types of insurance. Specifically, we examine the roles of customer satisfaction and quality measures on the one hand, and individual physician productivity measures on the other hand, in determining whether or not firms are more likely to accept patients who have private insurance, Medicare, or Medicaid. In the United States these different types of insurance mechanisms cover populations with different levels of vulnerability. Medicare (elderly and disabled individuals) and Medicaid (low income households) enrollees commonly have lower ability to pay any cost sharing associated with care, are more likely to have multiple comorbidities (and so be more costly to treat), and may be more sensitive to poor access. Further, these two insurers also generally reimburse less generously than private payors. Thus, if lower reimbursements interact with compensation mechanisms to discourage physician practices from accepting new patients, highly vulnerable populations may be at even greater risk than generally appreciated. We control for the potential endogeneity of incentive choice using a multi-level propensity score method. We find that the compensation incentives chosen by practices are statistically and economically significant predictors for the types of new patients that practices accept. These findings have important implications for both policy makers and private health care systems.

A Field Too Crowded? How Measures of Market Structure Shape Nonprofit Fiscal Health:

This article explores how various dimensions of market structure, often used to measure organizational crowding, affect the fiscal health of nonprofit organizations. Using 2011 National Center for Charitable Statistics (NCCS) nonprofit sector data, our findings generally support population ecology’s model of a curvilinear relationship between density and days of spending. However, we also find that single dimensions of market structure do not fully capture the effects of market competition. Increasing density has a negative effect on the fiscal health of organizations in markets in which resources are more evenly distributed among actors, whereas increasing density of organizations has a positive effect on organizational fiscal health in markets in which resources are less evenly distributed among actors. These results are sensitive to different specifications of fiscal health and field of nonprofit activity.

Sector Differences in Employee’s Perceived Importance of Income and Job Security: Can These be Found Across the Contexts of Countries, Cultures, and Occupations?

ABSTRACT Most empirical research has shown that people working in the public sector perceive job security as more important than people working in the private sector, while the inverse is the case for job income. However, it is not known if these relationships hold globally while controlling for occupation and national context. We combine ISSP data from respondents in 25 countries with Hofstede’s cultural dimensions and World Bank data to examine whether the previous generally accepted claims hold while taking into account workers’ occupation, as well as national, cultural, and economic conditions. We find evidence that even when taking into account all these factors, government workers place a higher value on job security than private workers, but contrary to the generally accepted claim, we find no statistically significant difference between government and private workers in their high-income motives when taking the occupation and national context into the models.