Thomas Pallesen

“Not Just for the Money?” How Financial Incentives Affect the Number of Publications at Danish Research Institutions

ABSTRACT Do public employees work “for the money?” Do financial incentives determine their work effort? The literature gives conflicting answers, but Frey (1997) offers a possible explanation: If financial incentives are perceived as supportive, they can “crowd in” intrinsic motivation and increase the work effort. But if financial incentives are perceived as controlling, the intrinsic motivation is “crowded out,” and the work effort decreases with increasing financial incentives to work. However, the empirical evidence concerning Freys proposition is limited, and our article aims to fill part of this gap. We investigate how the introduction of financial incentives to publish affects the number of publications at 162 Danish research institutions (17 government research institutions and subunits of 10 universities) when the perception of the incentives is taken into account. The results show that the more supportive employees consider the incentives to be, the more financial incentives motivate researchers to increase publication.

Does Ownership Matter? Public Service Motivation Among Physiotherapists in the Private and Public Sectors in Denmark:

Is public service motivation (PSM) higher in the public sector than in the private sector? Or does the level of PSM depend on the task rather than on the sector in which the employee works? It is often difficult to investigate sector differences, as private and public employees typically perform different tasks. Here, we investigate the differences in the PSM levels for a single occupational group performing the same tasks in the private and public sectors: Danish physiotherapists. The article also aims to investigate whether public and private sector employment is related to different types of PSM. The most important findings are that there is no difference in the general level of PSM between employees performing the same tasks in public and private organizations, but whereas private sector physiotherapists seem to be more narrowly oriented toward the user, public sector physiotherapists have a broader orientation toward the public interest.

Institutions, distributional concerns, and public sector reform

As in other Western countries, a wave of reform has swept the Danish public sector. The record of these reforms is mixed and paradoxical; an ambiguous delegation of executive authority and radical privatization have been successfully implemented, while other measures, especially contracting out and user democracy or the introduction of greater choice, turn out to have failed. The paper argues that this experience offers two general lessons. First, short-term costs and benefits are decisive to those who enact and implement public sector reform. Second, institutional factors specific to each type of reorganization have a major impact on the political distribution of costs and benefits.

The Political Benefits of Corporatization and Privatization

In recent years Denmark has seen a huge corporatization and privatization program. As it is an unlikely reformer, the policy shift makes the country an interesting test case for the analysis of public sector changes. The paper argues that the Danish corporatization and privatization program fits into a general pattern. The program has been successfully implemented because it has allowed the governing coalition to reap important short-term political benefits without compromising a long-term quest for political control. However, these radical changes that together constitute a virtual wave of reforms have been initiated because politicians belonging to the governing coalition have come to the knowledge of new theoretic and empirical insights that open their eyes to short-term political benefits formerly unacknowledged.

The Fiscal Manipulation of a Decentralized Public Sector: Macroeconomic Policy in Denmark

The authors challenge the conventional wisdom according to which a decentralized public sector makes it difficult to instrumentalize the public budget for macroeconomic control purposes. Although the literature has already demonstrated that the statistical relationship between decentralization and macroeconomic performance is not as straightforward as is indicated by the conventional wisdom, and that decentralization actually seems to be positively correlated with macroeconomic performance, a gap exists in the literature as to the causal relationship, that is, the exact mechanisms by which decentralization impacts on performance. The authors begin to fill that gap by investigating the workings of one decentralized public budget, namely that of Denmark.

The Politics of Contracting Out in School Districts: The Case of Washington State

Government officials view con? tracting out of services as a de? sirable means of managing and modernizing the public sector. A number of studies have investigated the benefits of con? tracting out and the challenges it brings for service delivery (Hodge 2000; DeHoog and Salamon 2002). Other studies have addressed the circumstances under which government officials seek to set up contractual relation? ships. Various factors such as the local market structure for services and the size of the local?