Tima Moldogaziev is assistant professor of public fi nance and public management at the University of South Carolina. His research focuses on organizational behavior as it relates to empowerment, innovation, and performance in the public sector, contracting, and resource management. He also publishes on matters of subnational debt management, fi nancial intermediation and regulation, and municipal securities pricing and liquidity.

Employee empowerment programs have been widely adopted in the public sector as a way to improve organizational performance. Empowered employees improve performance largely by finding innovative ways of correcting errors in service delivery and redesigning work processes.Failure to encourage innovation can seriously undermine the effectiveness of empowerment programs. Based on Bowen and Lawler's conceptualization of employee empowerment as a multifaceted management approach, this study explores how different empowerment practices can be used to encourage U.S. federal government employees to seek out new and better ways of doing things. The empirical results show that while employee empowerment as an overall approach can increase encouragement to innovate, empowerment practices have divergent effects, and some may even discourage innovation.During the 1980s and 1990s, many American firms adopted employee empowerment programs to help maintain their competitive edge in the face of rising global competition (Bowen and Lawler

Since 2002, the U.S. Office of Personnel Management has used the Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey (FEVS) to monitor efforts by federal executive agencies to manage human capital. Public management researchers have used FEVS data to produce dozens of peer‐reviewed publications on a range of topics of interest to policy makers, practitioners, and academics. Despite the proliferation of these empirical studies, the field of public management until now has lacked a critical assessment of the FEVS and of how researchers have used the data. In this article, the authors discuss the strengths of the FEVS and the opportunities this survey has created for public management researchers. Despite important contributions made to the literature using the data, there are weaknesses in the content, design, and implementation of the FEVS. The authors offer a set of recommendations for refining the survey and its implementation with the aim of improving the quality and value of the data. In doing so, they hope to foster a dialogue between public management researchers and the Office of Personnel Management on the future of the FEVS and to forge a stronger link between these two communities.

For more than a decade, public organizations have been adopting employee empowerment with the aim of improving performance and job satisfaction and promoting innovativeness. Our understanding of employee empowerment has been hindered by a dearth of empirical research on its uses and consequences in the public sector. Based on Bowen and Lawler's conceptualization of employee empowerment, this study explores the link between various empowerment practices and perceived performance in federal agencies. It is found that empowerment practices aimed at providing employees with access to job-related knowledge and skills and at granting them discretion to change work processes have a positive and substantively significant influence on perceived performance. Other empowerment practices geared toward providing employees with information about goals and performance and offering them rewards based on performance are found, however, to have little bearing on perceptions of performance.

Theories describing rent seeking in the public sector posit a number of negative fiscal outcomes that the choices of corrupt officials may generate. The evidence presented in this article shows that states with greater intensities of public corruption have higher aggregate levels of state and local debt. If corruption in the 10 most corrupt states were only at an average level, their public debt would be 9 percent lower, or about $249.35 per capita, all else being equal. Notably, institutional control measures may not have succeeded in restraining the expansion of state and local public debt in the presence of greater levels of corruption. State and local governments would achieve more efficient levels of fiscal discipline by curbing public sector corruption. Practitioner Points• Curbing public corruption can help state and local governments reduce the amount of public debt and the extra costs that the debt markets inflict on more corrupt jurisdictions. • The issuance of long-term private-purpose debts is affected more seriously by corruption, which invites closer attention of policy makers to this market. • Curbing corruption helps institutional control measures work as they are designed and, as a consequence, restrains the expansion of public debt.

Employee empowerment practices have been widely adopted in public organizations in Europe, the Pacific Rim, and North America. In this study, employee empowerment is conceptualized as a multifaceted approach composed of various practices aimed at sharing information, resources, rewards, and authority with lower level employees. Self-Determination Theory is used to theorize about the effects of these different empowerment practices on job satisfaction. The results of the empirical analysis, based on 2010 Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey (FEVS) data, indicate that empowerment practices aimed at promoting self-determination (i.e., sharing information about goals and performance, providing access to job-related knowledge and skills, and granting discretion to change work processes) have positive and sizable effects on job satisfaction. Conversely, empowerment practices that undermine autonomy (i.e., offering contingent-based rewards) have no meaningful effect on job satisfaction.

In this paper, we survey the cost differentials by debt issue purpose and the method of underwriting. We find that cost differentials are a function of the purpose for which the debt was issued, with bond purposes traditionally considered riskier facing higher borrowing costs. However, this effect is not uniform and varies by credit quality portfolios. Moreover, the method of bond sale is an important factor for true interest costs. Overall, the competitive method of sale consistently performs better than the negotiated method of sale in all regression models, even after correcting for self-selection. Guzman and Moldogaziev/Cost Differentials by Debt Issue Purpose and Method of Sale 79sale method matter? Other debt issuance decisions may also be of high importance-debt instrument structure choices, special options, credit enhancements, and payment structures and sources-all will have direct implications for municipal borrowing costs. Previous empirical studies suggest that credit ratings (both enhanced and underlying), call and put provisions, underwriter's method of sale, and a maturity structure of bond series are significant factors in a broad array of determinants that have been found to have a significant effect on municipal borrowing costs (Denison, Yan, and Robbins and Simonsen 2007). Researchers have also found that revenue bond issuers, compared to general obligation (GO) bonds, pay higher interest on their debt (Hopwell and Kaufman 1977;Peng and Brucato 2004;Yusuf and Liu 2008). However, with a few exceptions, these studies tend to focus on a single industry or aggregate the issue purpose types to low-risk and high-risk categories (Peng and Brucato 2004). Consequently, studies that address diverse industries and cost differentials associated with such diversity are rare. We attempt to fill this gap by presenting empirical evidence on cost differentials by debt issue industry in California and by discussing management decision choices on how to keep municipal debt issue costs as low as possible. We distinguish between debt industries issued for the purposes of higher and secondary education, development, public facilities, housing, utilities, environmental facilities, health care, transportation, and other miscellaneous purposes. In addition to issue purpose, we pay attention to the sources of debt repayment to account for the differences in interest costs based on perceived default probabilities by market participants. We use controls for market-related and issue/issuer specific characteristics. 1 We begin our paper by discussing the background rationale and the relevant literature from the field of state and local government debt finance. We then describe characteristics of the data that we use in this empirical research and carefully examine outcome and explanatory variables. In the discussion of variables, embedded are the findings from current municipal finance literature that provide theoretical and empirical justifications for the variables in the regression models. After the discussion of vari...

This study examines whether the various leadership roles undertaken by public sector managers have an important association with subordinates' levels of affective commitment to the organization. Our empirical findings suggest that not all leadership practices matter. It appears that only relations‐oriented and change‐oriented leadership, and to a far lesser extent integrity‐oriented leadership, have a substantive association with affective organizational commitment. Task‐oriented leadership and, to a large degree, integrity‐oriented leadership, are found not to matter much for employees with lower levels of affective commitment, but they look to strengthen fondness of the organization among those with already high levels of affective commitment. Results also suggest that the diversity‐oriented leadership role has no association with affective commitment to the organization.