Papers by Stuart Bretschneider
Sustainability
Public procurement, the government’s purchase of goods and services, is an important tool to adva... more Public procurement, the government’s purchase of goods and services, is an important tool to advance sustainability objectives. Since government is the largest consumer in the economy, it can have a sizable impact on the market by purchasing sustainably. However, its sustainability impact (both environmental and social) is undermined because the public procurement’s size is underestimated. Previous estimates of public procurement only consider contract-based purchases or non-defense purchases. In other instances, data are too limited to estimate government purchases appropriately. These factors lead to underestimations of the extent to which government purchasing can be leveraged to advance sustainability objectives. To understand the true impact of government purchases, we estimated the size of public procurement by considering all aspects of public procurement. We used this estimation to assess whether current measurement processes misrepresent the size of public procurement and i...
Public Administration Review
Sustainability
Some U.S. local governments are leveraging public procurement to meet their sustainability goals.... more Some U.S. local governments are leveraging public procurement to meet their sustainability goals. However, does the simultaneous pursuit of multiple sustainability objectives potentially slow down the speed of procurement processes? We suggest that the simultaneous pursuit of multiple sustainability objectives through procurement is related to decision making speed. Additionally, we argue that centralized decision-making structures might moderate this relationship. Drawing on a representative sample of more than 200 U.S. local governments, we demonstrate that for low-cost purchases, as the number of policy objectives increases, so too does the average length of time for approval. We also find evidence of an interactive relationship between decision-making structures and the number of existing sustainability policies pursued simultaneously. For routine low-cost and routine high-cost purchases, we find evidence that as the centralization of procurement decision making increases, the m...
Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory
Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory
Journal of Public Affairs Education
Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory
IEEE Engineering Management Review
For green technology firms, government's shifting preference for sustainable products and... more For green technology firms, government's shifting preference for sustainable products and services is likely to become an increasingly important market factor. Green technology firms are thus in an excellent position to respond to greater calls for environmentally friendly products and services and derive market advantages from doing so. Moreover, green technology firms possess the knowledge, expertise, and experience that can increase local governments' SPP adoption and implementation success. Drawing from the results of two recent studies, this paper presents five reasons why green technology firms should care about local governments' recent trend toward SPP adoption.
Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, a... more JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact
Korean Review of Public Administration
Chinese Public Administration Review
We are interested in theoretical explanations of extreme behavior in social and management scienc... more We are interested in theoretical explanations of extreme behavior in social and management science situations. For example, in studying organizational performance we theorize that organzations achieve high levels of performance by employing innovative or unique behavioral characteristics. Methodologically, several approaches that provdie tools for modeling extreme behavior: substantively weighted analytical techniques (SWAR) and quantile regression. We evaluate both for their ability to accurately estimate models of extreme behavior when that behavior significantly differs from the average case. Since we attempt to evaluate statistical approaches in situations where standard axiomatic approaches fall short, our strategiy is to use simulation techniques where the underlying data-generating structure is knows and designed to have different underlying mathematical relationships between the middle and the two extremes. We also apply a Monte Carlo approach of repeated simulations to inve...
Chinese Public Administration Review
The area of best practice research has only recently begun to embrace statistically based compari... more The area of best practice research has only recently begun to embrace statistically based comparisons as a basis for identifying recommended practices. In part motivated by growing interest in performance measurement activities these new approaches hold significant potential for improvin our ability to identify and utilize true best practices. Unfortunately, little has been done to study how to apply statistical methods to this task appropriately. In this paper a Monte Carlo evaluation is developed to demonstrate that how Quantile Regression methods can be used to identify best practice. After a brief literature review and a summary of the Quantile Regression technique, the paper develops a specific monte carle simulation design based on statistical situations with varying numbers of high, medium and low performing organizations. Next, we apply quantile regression to the simulated data and attempts to develop some reasonable guidance about how to apply quantile regressions to real w...
J Air Waste Manage Assoc, 1990
A number of policies adopted by the federal government and the state have been designed to promot... more A number of policies adopted by the federal government and the state have been designed to promote waste reduction or influence the choice of waste disposal technologies employed by generators of hazardous waste. Graphic analysis of smoothed time series data for hazardous wastes manifested in New York State for the period between June 1982 and February 1987 suggests that some of these policies have had the intended effects. Significant shifts in manifested waste volumes are evident that coincide with the following policy interventions: (1) increased state waste-end tax rates; (2) state and federal landfill bans; (3) federal restrictions on burning hazardous wastes and waste oils for energy recovery; and (4) changes in the federal regulatory definition of hazardous waste. Other changes in waste generation and management appear to be attributable to such factors as state and regional economic conditions and changes in instate treatment and disposal facility capacity. Analysis of the management of specific waste types supports evidence from the graphic analysis that waste generators changed from land disposal to "higher" waste handling technologies in response to several policy interventions.
Economics of Education Review, Feb 1, 2001
Developing measures of school performance is crucial for performance-based school reform efforts.... more Developing measures of school performance is crucial for performance-based school reform efforts. One approach to developing such measures is to apply econometric and linear programming techniques that have been developed to measure productive efficiency. This study uses simulated data to assess the adequacy of two such methods, Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) and Corrected Ordinary Least Squares (COLS), for the purposes of performance-based school reform. Our results suggest that in complex data sets typical of education contexts simple versions of DEA and COLS do not provide adequate measures of efficiency. In data sets simulated to contain both measurement error and endogeneity, rank correlations between efficiency estimates and true efficiency values range from 0.104 to 0.240. In none of these data sets were either DEA and COLS able to place more than 31% of schools in their true performance quintile.
Academy of Management Proceedings, 1989
In this paper, we improve upon Coe and Helpman's model of international R&D spillovers, using see... more In this paper, we improve upon Coe and Helpman's model of international R&D spillovers, using seemingly unrelated regression (SUR) to include interdependence among national economies and allow for variations in coefficients across countries. We find that the impact of knowledge spillovers on national productivity is context dependent: positive in some cases while negative in others. From our interpretation, the results suggest that both beneficial and competitive effects from foreign knowledge spillovers are important. We view the most important contribution of our work as simply providing evidence of this variation, and suggesting directions for future research to explain this phenomenon.
International Public Management Review, 2003
How can we identify best-practice providers? Under the combined influence of GPRA 1 , the NPR, th... more How can we identify best-practice providers? Under the combined influence of GPRA 1 , the NPR, the state and community benchmarking efforts, and GASB SEA reporting requirements, most federal, state, and local government agencies, private for-profit and nonprofit organizations delivering government programs under grants and contracts, will become involved in performance measurement. Once governments begin routinely collecting and reporting performance measurement data, policymakers and policy evaluators will be faced with the task of identifying best-practice providers. How can governments go about making comparisons among service providers using performance measurement data? Can best-practice providers actually be identified? Based on previous analysis using a Quantile Regression and SWLS model for estimation and inference, this article introduces a new approach to estimating models of extreme behavior. Quantile Regression and SWLS are investigated to lay a foundation for putting forward the new analysis technique: Segmentation Strategy. Then, some preparatory work for Monte Carlo Simulation, including determining the structure of simulated data sets, is described. Thirdly, the computational results are displayed and analyzed. Finally, some conclusions and future research directions are provided.
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Papers by Stuart Bretschneider