Zachary Mohr

Taking Stock: Assessing and Improving Performance Budgeting Theory and Practice

ABSTRACT Since the passage of the Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA) of 1993, the past 20 years represent one of the most remarkable eras for performance budgeting initiatives in the United States. As a result, many studies about this tool have been conducted and published. Based on a systematic review of articles on research related to performance budgeting in major journals in the ten years between 2002 and 2011, this study assesses how performance budgeting research has evolved over time, reviews its accomplishments, and suggests a few directions for future study, such as the need to control for different intervening factors to establish causality, the need for more coherent theoretical frameworks to guide empirical work and structure the relationship between causal factors, and the need for methodological diversity. We also present a few long-standing questions about performance budgeting that future studies may revisit carefully.

An Analysis of the Purposes of Cost Accounting in Large U.S. Cities

Research on U.S. government cost accounting has received little attention in recent years. This article analyzes four of the main reasons why large cities use cost accounting: performance management, grant overhead recovery, rate setting, and cost management to reduce fiscal stress. Using a cross section of 81 cities with populations over 100,000 people, it finds that cost allocation plans are correlated with lower fund balances and are positively correlated with enterprise expenditures. These correlations suggest that the use of cost accounting is related to fiscal stress and rate setting. Research limitations and policy implications are addressed.

Is Cost Accounting Used with Other NPM Practices? Evidence from European Countries

Abstract Cost accounting has not been studied extensively in the context of European central governments. This article looks at the use of cost accounting with two New Public Management practices: performance management and decentralization. The research finds that there is an increasing use of cost accounting for central government ministries that make greater use of performance management, which follows the theoretical prediction that cost accounting information and performance information can be used together to address agency problems. Greater decentralization is associated with a greater use of cost accounting, but the relationship between decentralization and cost accounting does not vary by agency or ministry.

Organizational Rule Attributes and Compliance: A Multi-Method Green Tape Study

This study examines the attributes of organizational rules that influence compliance. Rule compliance fosters organizational effectiveness by aligning individual behaviors with organizational preference. While a range of theoretical explanations has been offered for compliance behavior, the characteristics of rule design and implementation have received less empirical attention. Borrowing from the green tape theory of effective rules, this study examines the influence of two particular characteristics – rule formalization and rule consistency – on compliance behavior. Three studies, two vignette experiments and a survey of two local government organizations, provide the data for the research. The results suggest that rule formalization and rule consistency independently increase compliance, with mixed evidence of interaction effects. The broad implication is that public managers must attend to both rule design and implementation to secure compliance from employees.

The Relationship between Legal Status, Location, and Business Tax Preference: The Case of Kansas

The literature on business responses to state taxes traditionally holds businesses respond to tax differences through plant relocation and expansion planning. This literature is silent on the tradeoffs that businesses would make to a state’s tax policy, if they could adjust the taxes to suit their own preferences and legal status. This research addresses the question of what tradeoffs businesses would make in tax policy by utilizing the budgetary tradeoff methodology developed in the political science and political economy literature. As predicted by theory, firms responded to a survey by the Kansas Department of Commerce that they would minimize the taxes that they have to pay but differences exist among different types of businesses, particularly out of state businesses. Kansas is an interesting case given the state’s first-of-its-kind removal of taxes on pass through corporations. This case shows that the tax tradeoff theory is useful for analyzing the characteristics of firms’ tradeoff choices.