Agency Budgets Research Articles

When Does Public Information Undermine the Efficiency of Reverse Auctions for the Purchase of Ecosystem Services?

Government agencies that conduct reverse auctions related to the Payment of Ecosystem Services (PES) traditionally provide a significant amount of public information about past auction results. This information includes not only the amount of money spent by the government but also can include various information about the accepted bids. This research uses induced-value experiments to evaluate the effect of past auction information on seller (landholder) rent seeking. Results suggest that sellers use this public information and learn how to secure higher rents. However, when sellers are given information only about the buyer's (government agency's) budget, they secure lower rents. Results also suggest that relative budget size affects rents and that budget stochastic variability in the presence of market information diminishes the effect. Thus, in the presence of public information and equivalent total outlays, variable budgets are more likely than stationary budgets to achieve auction fiscal efficiency—the measure of whether the auction achieves the greatest PES benefits given its limited budget. Finally, this research finds that auctions with greater heterogeneity in seller opportunity costs are likely to be less fiscally efficient than when the distribution is more homogeneous.

Criteria-Based Resource Allocation: A Tool to Improve Public Health Impact.

Resource allocation in local public health (LPH) has been reported as a significant challenge for practitioners and a Public Health Services and Systems Research priority. Ensuring available resources have maximum impact on community health and maintaining public confidence in the resource allocation process are key challenges. A popular strategy in health care settings to address these challenges is Program Budgeting and Marginal Analysis (PBMA). This case study used PBMA in an LPH setting to examine its appropriateness and utility. The criteria-based resource allocation process PBMA was implemented to guide the development of annual organizational budget in an attempt to maximize the impact of agency resources. Senior leaders and managers were surveyed postimplementation regarding process facilitators, challenges, and successes. Canada's largest autonomous LPH agency. PBMA was used to shift 3.4% of the agency budget from lower-impact areas (through 34 specific disinvestments) to higher-impact areas (26 specific reinvestments). Senior leaders and managers validated the process as a useful approach for improving the public health impact of agency resources. However, they also reported the process may have decreased frontline staff confidence in senior leadership. In this case study, PBMA was used successfully to reallocate a sizable portion of an LPH agency's budget toward higher-impact activities. PBMA warrants further study as a tool to support optimal resource allocation in LPH settings.

Agency Finance in the Age of Executive Government

The rise of “executive government” has prompted a great deal of public debate and scholarly theorizing. This article examines one aspect of that very large subject: agency budgets or, more precisely, revenues. To an unprecedented extent, regulatory agencies have come to rely on non-appropriated funds for their ordinary operations. Many have become self-financing; some have become profit centers for wider executive exertions — and for Congress. We trace this development in two areas: agencies’ delegated authority to tax, and agency finance through settlement with private parties in criminal or civil enforcement proceedings. Due to a paucity of reliable data, our presentation is necessarily sketchy and tentative. We nonetheless proceed (with the appropriate caution) in the hope of informing a scholarly debate over “the administrative state” that to our minds has become excessively abstract and formalistic. Agency self-finance bears on many of the central themes of administrative and constitutional law: delegation and the separation of powers; congressional oversight; agency independence; the choice between rulemaking and enforcement or adjudication; and judicial review. Approaching the administrative state from its most pedestrian front opens a window both into its actual operation and constitutional rule-of-law questions.

Evaluating agency use of “best available science” under the United States Endangered Species Act

The United States Congress passed the Endangered Species Act (ESA) in 1973, a law aimed at preventing the extinction of rare species. Since then, the ESA has become increasingly politicized in the U.S., adding to the difficulty of ESA implementation and endangered species management, while species continue to go extinct at alarming rates. The ESA is among the first statues to include a “best available science” mandate, requiring that agencies use the best scientific and commercial data to guide key decisions. Because the way in which agencies use science under the ESA is often the legal basis for litigation, it is timely and pertinent to evaluate the federal agencies' sources of information—and their uses of this information. The “best” available science and its use are each moving targets, difficult to define in the abstract. However, a straightforward way of evaluating these ideas is to compare the use of science by each of the two administrative agencies in charge of implementing the ESA, the Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Marine Fisheries Service (NOAA). Here, we use bibliographic data, litigation records, authorship affiliation, and related data to ask whether the two agencies' use of scientific information differs systematically. Overall, we find that NOAA draws more deeply from the scientific literature and is somewhat better buffered from changes in political administration than is FWS. These results suggest NOAA's implementation is more closely aligned with commonly held ideas of good scientific practice than that of FWS, although in some cases these differences could also result from the different amounts of available information on the species each agency manages. We then interpret these findings in the context of each agency's budget, structure, and history and highlight specific policy mechanisms that would allow the agencies to improve endangered species management, and reduce their own exposure to litigation, by improving their use of high-quality scientific information.

The peculiar economics of federal energy management

US federal agency energy managers face different constraints than do comparable private sector managers. They are faced with energy consumption goals mandated via legislation or directed via Presidential Executive Order that encourage if not compel them to invest more in energy efficiency or renewables than would be cost effective from a private sector perspective. To make such investments, they also are provided access to private capital that is additional to their agency budgets. The encouragement to invest beyond what is cost effective may be a source of waste in some instances, and the financing mechanisms appear more expensive than necessary. A rough estimate of the magnitude of the waste is offered, as well as a mechanism to reduce the costs of agency access to capital.

An Examination of Seven Sociopolitical Factors and Their Connection with State Environmental Expenditures

<p class="1"><span lang="EN-GB">State environmental agencies serve as first-responders during and after environmental disasters (man-made or natural), track and identify individuals and businesses that violate anti-pollution statutes, and function as scientific and data-gathering centers for policy makers. The robustness of a state environmental agency’s budget also can be a measure of a state’s environmental commitment. An understanding of the funding dynamics associated with establishing a state’s environmental agency budget is a complex political ballet with often mysterious and competing forces influencing the financial choreography. </span></p><p class="1"><span lang="EN-GB">This paper analyzes possible political and cultural influences on budgetary outcomes in an attempt to identify those common, underlying, non-econometric factors that may drive or significantly contribute to state environmental agency funding. Those described here include, for 49 states (exclusive of Hawaii) between 2000 and 2009, total state expenditures, per capita income, educational attainment, agency staffing, environmental quality as measured through impaired waters, citizen ideology, and state agency performance. A Pearson’s product moment correlation coefficient is used to compare state environmental expenditures to these seven data sets. </span></p><p class="1"><span lang="EN-GB">Those states showing the biggest change (positive or negative) in annual environmental agency budgets also have the strongest correlation (positive or negative) with the total number of independent variables. This relationship implies that changes to sociopolitical factors may sway or have an influence on state environmental agency funding. As the number of correlations increase, their effect on agency funding may become more pronounced. This suggests a “critical mass” type relationship. Alternatively, as more sociopolitical factors combine to compel either increases or decreases in environmental agency funding, legislative priorities might be re-organized to accommodate that pressure with funding levels adjusted accordingly. The confluence of these special interests, either positively or negatively, may force environmental agency funding levels to overcome or shed local suppressive or masking effects (political scandals, policy distractions, etc.) to more closely reflect constituent demands and concerns. </span></p>

The effect of agency budgets on minimizing greenhouse gas emissions from road rehabilitation policies

Transportation agencies are being urged to reduce their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. One possible solution within their scope is to alter their pavement management system to include environmental impacts. Managing pavement assets is important because poor road conditions lead to increased fuel consumption of vehicles. Rehabilitation activities improve pavement condition, but require materials and construction equipment, which produce GHG emissions as well. The agency’s role is to decide when to rehabilitate the road segments in the network. In previous work, we sought to minimize total societal costs (user and agency costs combined) subject to an emissions constraint for a road network, and demonstrated that there exists a range of potentially optimal solutions (a Pareto frontier) with tradeoffs between costs and GHG emissions. However, we did not account for the case where the available financial budget to the agency is binding. This letter considers an agency whose main goal is to reduce its carbon footprint while operating under a constrained financial budget. A Lagrangian dual solution methodology is applied, which selects the optimal timing and optimal action from a set of alternatives for each segment. This formulation quantifies GHG emission savings per additional dollar of agency budget spent, which can be used in a cap-and-trade system or to make budget decisions. We discuss the importance of communication between agencies and their legislature that sets the financial budgets to implement sustainable policies. We show that for a case study of Californian roads, it is optimal to apply frequent, thin overlays as opposed to the less frequent, thick overlays recommended in the literature if the objective is to minimize GHG emissions. A promising new technology, warm-mix asphalt, will have a negligible effect on reducing GHG emissions for road resurfacing under constrained budgets.

Financially-legal aspects of decentralization prosses of public administration in Ukraine today

The objective of the article is the accumulation and review of existing regulatory material regarding the decentralization process, namely the implementation of fiscal decentralization, and financial and legal analysis of the current state of local Finance and their legal regulation reform in modern conditions of development of Ukraine taking into account foreign experience. The relevance of the research topics is the need of the modern understanding of legal regulation of decentralization processes in public administration of Ukraine and the state of development of law in these processes. Doclet themes. The problem of decentralization of financial resources and authority devoted a lot of research scientists (N. Bykadorova, A. Bondarenko, N. Kaminska, I. Karchevsky, P. Kolody, B. Krajnik, I. Legkostup, J. Ostroshenko and others) both in Ukraine and abroad. The author explores the concept of decentralization, financial decentralization, the decentralization of power. Analyzed the legal value of laws of Ukraine: "On principles of state regional policy" and "On voluntary consolidation of territorial communities" for further reform actions in Ukraine. Analyzed components of the new system in the formation of profitable and account parts of local budgets, the determination of the principles of transfer policy and intergovernmental relations. The main objectives of such a system and ways of their implementation are as follows: 1. Ensure fiscal autonomy and financial independence of local budgets 2. The consolidation of local budgets in the stable sources of income and stimulate podatkovni communities. 3. Strengthening the responsibility of relevant ministries for the balance of financial resources and sectoral policies, in particular through the mechanism of providing educational and medical subsidies, subsidies for personnel training. 4. The expansion of spending powers of local authorities by transferring funding from the local budgets of individual budget programmes and agencies, which are now financed from the state budget. 5. The introduction of a new mechanism of budgetary regulation and equalization. In Ukraine the process of fiscal decentralization takes place quite actively, consistently, with a fairly full legislative regulatory the development of this process, which is a positive thing for Ukraine in the historical development of both areas and the state.

Antitrust, Competition Policy, and Inequality

Economic inequality recently has entered the political discourse in a highly visible way. This political impact is not a surprise. As the U.S. economy has begun to recover from the Great Recession since mid-2009, economic growth has effectively been appropriated by those already well off, leaving the median household less well off. The serious economic, political and moral issues raised by inequality can be addressed through a panoply of public policies including competition policy, the focus of this article. The article describes the channels through which market power contributes to inequality, and sets forth a range of possible antitrust policy adjustments that might be considered in response to that market power, or to inequality more generally. The aim of this article is to identify various potential competition policy alternatives that would respond to concerns about inequality, while recognizing that some are more controversial and provocative than others. These policy adjustments include embracing the consumer welfare standard, increasing enforcement agency budgets, targeting enforcement and remedies to benefit the less advantaged, adopting more interventionist antitrust and regulatory standards, recognizing abuse of dominance as an antitrust offense, and adopting reduction of inequality as an explicit antitrust goal.

Science on a Shoestring: Building Nursing Knowledge With Limited Funding.

Building the science for nursing practice has never been more important. However, shrunken federal and state research budgets mean that investigators must find alternative sources of financial support and develop projects that are less costly to carry out. New investigators often build beginning programs of research with limited funding. This article provides an overview of some cost-effective research approaches and gives suggestions for finding other sources of funding. Examples of more cost-effective research approaches include adding complementary questions to existing funded research projects; conducting primary analysis of electronic patient records and social media content; conducting secondary analysis of data from completed studies; reviewing and synthesizing previously completed research; implementing community-based participatory research; participating in collaborative research efforts such as inter-campus team research, practice-based research networks (PBRNs), and involving undergraduate and doctoral students in research efforts. Instead of relying on funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and other government agencies, nurse researchers may be able to find support for research from local sources such as businesses, organizations, or clinical agencies. Investigators will increasingly have to rely on these and other creative approaches to fund and implement their research programs if granting agency budgets do not significantly expand.

Discretionary Authority and Prioritizing in Government Agencies

Government agencies typically have a certain freedom to choose among different possible courses of action. This paper studies agency decision-making on priorities in a principal-agent framework with multi-tasking. The agency head (the principal) has discretion over part of the agency's budget to incentivize his staff (agents) in the pick-up of cases. The head is concerned with society's benefits from the agency's overall performance, but also with the organization's public image as formed from its case record and various non-case specific activities. Based on their talent and the contracts offered by the head, staff officials choose which type of task to pursue: complex major, yet difficult to complete cases with an uncertain outcome, or basic minor and simple cases with a much higher probability of success. The size of the agency's discretionary budget influences no t only the scale, but also the type of tasks it will engage in. Social welfare is non-monotonic and discontinuous in the agency's budget. Small changes in the budget may cause extensive restructuring from major to minor tasks, or vice versa. A budget cut can improve welfare more than extra budget would, even if resources are below the welfare-maximizing level. For lower binding budgets, the head continues to suboptimally incentivize work on complex tasks, when the agency should have shifted down to simpler tasks. Yet a reluctant head may need to be nudged with more resources to pursue productive cases. In determining the discretionary space of the agency head, government can limit the extraction of resources, but thereby also benefits less from the head's expertise. Antitrust authorities serve as one illustration of policy implications for institutional design.

A Burning Problem: Social Dynamics of Disaster Risk Reduction through Wildfire Mitigation

Disasters result from hazards affecting vulnerable people. Most disasters research by anthropologists focuses on vulnerability; this article focuses on natural hazards. We use the case of wildfire mitigation on United States Forest Service lands in the northwestern United States to examine social, political, and economic variables at multiple scales that influence fire hazard and risk reduction treatments and their effectiveness. Variables highlighted include policy direction to prioritize wildfire risk reduction in the wildland-urban interface, laws and policies that make treating fuels in some national forest land management allocations challenging, social and political constraints on using prescribed fire, agency budget and target pressures, and integrating fire hazard reduction into forest management projects having multiple objectives. These variables compromise the effectiveness of wildfire mitigation treatments. Understanding the social dynamics of natural hazard mitigation is important because they affect its outcomes, creating differential exposure to natural hazards—one component of social vulnerability. Interdisciplinary research to identify how the social dynamics of natural hazard mitigation influence hazard reduction outcomes can contribute to more informed and effective approaches to disaster risk reduction.

Discretionary Authority and Prioritizing in Government Agencies

Government agencies typically have a certain freedom to choose among different possible courses of action. This paper studies agency decision-making on priorities in a principal-agent framework with multi-tasking. The agency head (the principal) has discretion over part of the agency's budget to incentivize his staff (agents) in the pick-up of cases. The head is concerned with society's benefits from the agency's overall performance, but also with the organization's public image as formed from its case record and various non-case specific activities. Based on their talent and the contracts offered by the head, staff officials choose which type of task to pursue: complex major, yet difficult to complete cases with an uncertain outcome, or basic minor and simple cases with a much higher probability of success. The size of the agency's discretionary budget influences not only the scale, but also the type of tasks it will engage in. Social welfare is non-monotonic and discontinuous in the agency's budget. Small changes in the budget may cause extensive restructuring from major to minor tasks, or vice versa. A budget cut can improve welfare more than extra budget would, even if resources are below the welfare-maximizing level. For lower binding budgets, the head continues to suboptimally incentivize work on complex tasks, when the agency should have shifted down to simpler tasks. Yet a reluctant head may need to be nudged with more resources to do cases. In determining the discretionary space of the agency head, government can limit the extraction of resources, but thereby also benefits less from the head's expertise. Antitrust authorities serve as one illustration of policy implications for institutional design.

Budget- and priority-setting criteria at state health agencies in times of austerity: a mixed-methods study.

We examined critical budget and priority criteria for state health agencies to identify likely decision-making factors, pressures, and opportunities in times of austerity. We have presented findings from a 2-stage, mixed-methods study with state public health leaders regarding public health budget- and priority-setting processes. In stage 1, we conducted hour-long interviews in 2011 with 45 health agency executive and division or bureau leaders from 6 states. Stage 2 was an online survey of 207 executive and division or bureau leaders from all state health agencies (66% response rate). Respondents identified 5 key criteria: whether a program was viewed as "mission critical," the seriousness of the consequences of not funding the program, financing considerations, external directives and mandates, and the magnitude of the problem the program addressed. We have presented empirical findings on criteria used in state health agency budgetary decision-making. These criteria suggested a focus and interest on core public health and the largest public health problems with the most serious ramifications.

Advertising agency operating efficiency

This study uses data envelopment analysis to evaluate the operating efficiency of a sample of 41 US advertising agencies, based on their profits and expenditures in six key areas (i.e., payroll to employees, other payroll-related expenses, administrative expenses, space and facilities expenses, corporate expenses, and professional fees). The analyses reveal that, on average, 5% of an agency's budget is wasted, incurring the greatest amount of waste in the administrative and corporate expenses. The tobit model also indicates that professional fees contributed the most agency inefficiency overall.

The distribution and policy implications of US state government general operating support to the arts and culture: Lessons from the great recession

The prolonged economic downturn has meant tough times for some nonprofit arts and culture organizations in the USA. This state of affairs has brought renewed attention to the importance of general operating support (GOS) to sustaining nonprofit arts and culture organizations. After the Culture Wars of the late 1980s and 1990s, federal GOS programs disappeared and philanthropy turned away from providing such unrestricted funds, which are typically used for salaries and overhead rather than projects. What GOS support remained was provided primarily by state and local governments. Currently, the Great Recession has prompted cuts – sometimes drastic cuts – to state arts agencies. This article uses data from the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies (NASAA) supplemented with new data on line items culled from the budgets of every US state to map state-level GOS support. Enhancing NASAA data with data on line items provides a truer picture of the levels of support state governments are providing to the sector. The new data enable us to see whether states have shifted dollars from agency budgets into line items during the period from 2009 to 2011. Such shifts can bring into focus the organizations that are best politically positioned to maintain support even when agency budgets are being cut. An assessment of the ways in which new competition for GOS resources may create or magnify inequity in the sector is provided.

The Environmental Protection Agency's Budget from 1970 to 2010: A Lifecycle Analysis

Using three approaches, we attempt to explain changes in the Environmental Protection Agency's operating budget from 1970 to 2010. First, we compare qualitative predictions from two general types of agency lifecycle theories to the actual path of the EPA's budget. Second, we test empirically several hypotheses regarding the effects of political, economic, and other variables on the agency's budget. Third, we conduct detailed historical case studies of selected years. The results offer hints of support for theories predicting incremental change but do not support the hypothesized effects of external factors. We also uncover some historical anomalies that warrant further research.

A Mid Atlantic brook trout (Salvelinus fontinalis) stream sustainability statistic for rating non-tidal streams

Due to the decline of Mid Atlantic brook trout populations coupled with diminishing budgets of relevant natural resource agencies who monitor the populations, a quick and cost effective assessment of brook trout streams or potential brook trout streams in the Mid-Atlantic United States is warranted. Using five core metrics – two watershed metrics (percent land use in agriculture and distance to the nearest road from the survey site) and three in-stream metrics (riffle/run quality, dissolved oxygen content and water temperature), a classification model has been developed, useful as preliminary indication as to a stream’s suitability to sustain brook trout populations. Developed via discriminant analysis using Maryland Department of Natural Resources’ historical stream data, two classification equations (Smith–Sklarew equations) can be simplified into one equation, which produces a sustainability statistic (S). Should the five field measurements from the metrics produce a positive “S” value at a given site, then the stream reach most likely favors conditions suitable for sustainable brook trout populations. Conversely, negative “S” values indicate less than adequate conditions for sustainable brook trout populations.

Canadian Parliament Must Act on Assisted Human Reproduction

In the past three months, three members of the Board of Directors of Assisted Human Reproduction Canada (AHRC) have resigned. Their resignation letters include the following statements: '[that following requests for information about the Agency's spending and budget] there was much reluctance and procrastination in providing information, and that when the information was provided, there were inconsistencies in what I received and what was originally presented. This raises concerns in my mind about the prudence and diligence in managing public funds'; 'I have encountered difficulties as a board member in receiving satisfactory replies to concerns and questions I have raised which recently included audits and contracts. What I have been witness to is a resistance to give full and straightforward answers when questions and requests for clarification were made'; and 'I am unable to fulfill the duties entrusted to me in a manner that satisfies my conscience and my integrity.' This set of resignations is cause for serious concern and requires urgent attention from the federal Parliamentary Standing Committee on Health and Parliament itself.

Design and Control of Public-Service Contracts and an Application to Public Transportation Systems

Until the end of the 20th century it was common that cities organized, financed and managed their own public transportation systems. More recently -- in Italy mainly during the last decade -- many countries liberalized the service provision of public transportation. Indeed, while offering local public transportation is a political and financial duty of governments, the service provision is outsourced to a private Operator, while the government retains a control position, given to a regulatory Agency. This is a common scheme not only in transportation.In close collaboration with the public transportation agency of the city of Bologna, Italy, we designed a methodology to optimize some aspects of the contractual relationship between that Agency and the bus Operator. We focus on the fines specified by the contract when the Operator fails to comply with the service level it has agreed to provide, and on a procedure to measure that service level. Our approach has the benefit that it aligns the incentives of both parties in the benefit of bus riders. We model the Agency-Operator relationship as a multi-stage game and find its equilibrium to establish the best operating regime. The game theoretic approach provides expressions for the fines that the Operator should be charged if it does not satisfy the contracted services, and for the optimal Agency's budget to devote to control activities.Second, to check the compliance of the Operator to the schedule specified by the contract in a resource efficient way, we compute how to position the Agency's employees to verify if buses are running according to the specification in the contract. This is achieved by counting bus services and checking other quality indicators. We formulate this NP-hard problem as a Mixed Integer Linear Program, and propose an algorithm to solve it that is effective in providing itineraries for the controllers working for the Agency.