Patrick D. Larkey

Theorizing About the Growth of Government: A Research Assessment

This paper surveys literature from several disciplines on how and why governments grow. The empirical question as to whether, or to what degree, government has grown is critically entwined with the nature of the ‘dependent variable’ chosen (federal government expenditures as a proportion of GNP, total real public expenditures, number of government employees as a percentage of the workforce, etc.). Specific approaches to the study of government growth considered include those associated with: Wagners ‘Law’, the ‘Displacement Effect Hypothesis’, formal models of political and economic behavior, behavioral views of organizational decision making, the ineffectiveness of the public sector in coping with economic decline, and Marxist views.

Bridging Different Eras in Sports

Abstract This article addresses the problem of comparing abilities of players from different eras in professional sports. We study National Hockey League players, professional golfers, and Major League Baseball players from the perspectives of home run hitting and hitting for average. Within each sport, the careers of the players overlap to some extent. This network of overlaps, or bridges, is used to compare players whose careers took place in different eras. The goal is not to judge players relative to their contemporaries, but rather to compare all players directly. Hence the model that we use is a statistical time machine. We use additive models to estimate the innate ability of players, the effects of aging on performance, and the relative difficulty of each year within a sport. We measure each of these effects separated from the others. We use hierarchical models to model the distribution of players and specify separate distributions for each decade, thus allowing the “talent pool” within each sport...

Bias in the formulation of local government budget problems

Government budgets are premised on forecasts of revenues and expenditures. These forecasts are subject to both stochastic error and strategic manipulation. Circumstantial evidence in the budgeting literature and in the popular media suggest that government officials routinely bias the forecasts underlying budgets. The research reported here asked three primary questions: To what extent are budget forecasts systematically biased? Why? (Are fiscal and electoral variables systematically related to the magnitude and direction of the biases?) What political and ethical difference do the biases make? From the literature and an analysis of the incentives facing politicians and bureaucrats, we developed hypotheses about budget biases. These hypotheses were tested using time series data for the City of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (1941–1983); the City of San Diego, California (1950–1982); and the Pittsburgh (Pennsylvania) School District (1946–1983). In these locales over the periods examined, budgets were systematically pessimistic; revenues were underestimated and expenditures were overestimated. The fiscal and electoral factors hypothesized to account for this pessimism are, however, very mixed in their ability to explain the biases.

Buying in a Businesslike Fashion— And Paying More?

Introduction The logic of best practice in reforming government operations is simple and compelling. To reform any particular government operation, the government should (1) do a thorough benchmarking analysis of public and private counterparts to identify best practices in comparable operations; and, if a practice superior to the one in place is found through benchmarking, (2) adapt and adopt the identified best practice in reforming its own operation. The benchmarking of best practices should be results-oriented: best practices are the processes that lead to the best results. Unfortunately, the best practice approach, like most simple and compelling approaches to reforming government operations, is decidedly difficult to apply. The comparisons of operations across organizations that discover best practices are often astoundingly hard to do. The relevant results are frequently difficult to specify for even a single organization; in public-private comparisons, for example, procedural due process dimensions of public sector results that are missing in the private sector results can skew the comparison. There are usually multiple, complex causes for observed differences in results across organizations and some of these causes may be difficult to change, if not immutable. The differences in the cost-per-ton of refuse collection between cities in the southwest and the northeast may have more to do with terrain, weather, and physical configuration of refuse sources and disposal sites--all of which are difficult factors to change legislatively or administratively--than with easily manipulated organizational and management practices. These complications are obviously old news to experienced administrators and analysts; nothing, however, ever seems obvious to those promoting the latest faddish, simplistic approach to improving government operations. An increasingly popular variant of best practice for reforming government is commercial practice. The idea here, too, is simple and compelling. Most Americans, regardless of political persuasion, believe that private sector organizations properly disciplined by competitive markets are inherently more efficient than monopolistic government entities disciplined by political processes. If this belief is true, improving government operations is as simple as running them in a more businesslike fashion; identify good, if not the best, commercial practice and imitate it. Improved efficiency is sure to follow. Or is it? Unfortunately, instances exist where government operational practices are superior to commercial operational practices. Reforms requiring adoption of allegedly commercial practices can, in such instances, worsen the governments results. The research reported here shows instances in military purchasing where government practices were superior to commercial practices in terms of prices paid for aircraft engine and electronic components. Even with extremely favorable assumptions for the private sector, the military paid substantially less for these items. These military purchasing practices have been subsequently reformed in order to streamline defense purchasing and make it more businesslike, on the promise of freeing Department of Defense (DOD)resources for modernization and readiness. In some cases, the reforms require the military to adopt commercial practices in future purchases, effectively increasing the prices paid by the government for these commodities. In other cases, the reforms prevent the DoD from using purchasing practices common to large corporations. The beneficiaries of these reforms are not government purchasing entities, or American taxpayers, but instead the private suppliers who now receive higher prices from the government post-reform for their commodities and parts than they did pre-reform. While the full impact of the reforms on the governments costs can only be known when and if analyses of post-reform costs are done, the emerging evidence indicates large, perverse effects. …

Theorizing about public expenditure decision-making: (as) if wishes were horses ...

There have been several attempts to compare different approaches to modelling public expenditure decision-making. This paper is an extended comment on one such attempt: Fred Thompson and Richard Williams, “A Horse Race Around a Möbius Strip: A Review and a Test of Utility Maximizing and Organizational-Process Models of Public Expenditure Decisions.” In a commentary mode, we: (a) examine why tests of the sort that Thompson and Williams offer are neither definitive in choosing between models nor very useful in improving models; (b) outline a more meaningful test procedure; and (c) offer a somewhat more critical view than Thompson and Williams of the utility-maximizing approach to modelling public expenditure decisions.

Process models of governmental resource allocation and program evaluation

The General Revenue Sharing program poses problems for systematic evaluation that are similar to the problems posed by many public programs. Evaluation is very difficult when programs are not planned experiments and when program effects depend upon the discretionary responses of many individuals or organizations. The main difficulty is in knowing what would have happened without the program. Models of behavioral processes have an indispensable role in evaluating such programs. This paper considers the role of “process models” in program evaluation. It summarizs research on the impact of General Revenue Sharing on municipal fiscal behavior that used models of municipal resource allocation processes. Quasi-experimental research designs have been characterized as inherently inferior to experimental designs for program evaluation. There is no inherent inferiority. When we have good descriptive models of behavior, it is possible to evaluate programs rigorously without classic experimental research designs.

Ask a simple question: A retrospective on Herbert Alexander Simon

Herbert Simon, the Richard King Mellon University Professor of Computer Science and Psychology at Carnegie Mellon University and the most decorated behavioral and social scientist of the last millennium, died on February 9, 2001, aged 84. Simon’s lifelong obsession was to understand how humans make decisions and solve problems. The obsession was triggered by a policy question posed to him at the age of 19 about allocation behavior in a municipal government. This obsession stimulated contributions in several disciplines and the creation of new fields of inquiry. The relevance of Simon’s wide-ranging contributions in psychology, economics, computer science, political science, organization theory, philosophy, logic, and public administration to the policy sciences may not be immediately obvious to policy scientists. It should be.

Fiscal reform and governmental efficiency: Hanging tough

Many surveys of taxpayers in the wake of the fiscal reforms of the 1970s have indicated that frustration with the inefficiency and wastefulness of government is a major motive behind their votes for tax and expenditure limitations. There is a strongly held belief that government can do as much as it is currently doing with much less money. There is also a widespread belief that by reducing the dollar resources available to governments, they will be forced to become less wasteful and more efficient. This paper argues that increased efficiency in local government is an unlikely consequence of the fiscal reform movement. Indeed, lessened efficiency is a more probable outcome.

Models in Theory and Practice; Some examples, problems, and prospects

Alfonso X of Castile, in addition to commenting on the complexity of astronomical phenomena, probably complained frequently and bitterly about the high (astronomical?) costs of conducting research, paid his astronomers a pittance, required periodic progress reports, reduced his patronage in years following bad crops and increased it in years following successfully-predicted eclipses, bemoaned the infinitesimal rate of progress in comprehending the phenomena, insisted on conventional approaches in the research, assailed his astronomers both for their inability to communicate in terms he could understand and for the absence of useful results, and required them periodically to apply their knowledge in astrological forecasting and demonstrations to amuse and impress competing patrons. If these conjectures are correct, not much has changed in the relationship between researchers and patrons in the last six or seven hundred years. There have always been problems in the relationship between science and practice. But this issue is motivated by a perception that problems in the relationship between the social sciences and public policy are numerous, more intense, and more persistent than is the case with the relationship between other science and practice. These problems have been the subject of an unprecedented amount of study (see the bibliography of this editorial Introduction for examples). One of the several committees of distinguished scientists investigating these problems recently identified

Performance-based incentives in knowledge work: are agency models relevant?

The economic importance of knowledge work has become widely accepted. Less widely accepted are the changes knowledge work requires in how we manage performance. This paper explores the differences between knowledge work and more traditional physical and managerial work, in the context of economic agency models, the most rigorous extant theoretical representations of how to manage performance. Assumptions derived from the characteristics of knowledge work are used to extend agency models. The conclusions about how to manage from this extended model are different from the conclusions of traditional agency models. Linking measured performance and compensation - a common recommendation that arises from interpretations of agency theories - is effective in knowledge work contexts only if knowledge workers are intrinsically motivated. We conclude that agency models and recommendations derived from them are relevant only to the extent that they employ modified assumptions consistent with the distinctive characteristics of knowledge work and knowledge workers.