The research-practice gap has emerged as an acute problem in management scholars' internal professional debates. Evidence-based management (EBM) has been proposed as a remedy, and it is gaining adherents. This article offers a critical examination of the EBM proposal and its justification. The...

In recent years, scholars have developed new analytical tools and financial instruments that could help governments cope more effectively with financial volatility. In this essay we show how states can achieve fiscal sustainability using financial instruments based upon mean-variance analysis:...

In this paper we leverage a national panel of US municipalities to show that a pair of heuristics identified from the behavioral economics literature, anchoring and the bandwagon effect, help to explain the number of years of expenses municipalities hold in reserve. We build our empirical case...

It is puzzling that the single most important explanatory variable for municipal reserves is the state in which a municipality is located. In this paper we leverage a broad panel of US municipalities to show that a pair of behavioral heuristics: anchoring and the bandwagon effect, are an...

This article evaluates two alternative standards for resetting property assessments on title transfer in property tax systems like Oregon's and California's, which are explicitly designed to protect property owners against rapid, unanticipated increases in their tax bills: California's reset to...

Quantitative public financial management research is limited by the absence of a common database for empirical analysis (Gill and Meier 2000). While the U.S. Census Bureau distributes government finance data that some scholars have utilized, the arduous process of collecting, interpreting, and...

Private enterprises should be concerned with maximizing productivity. Government should be concerned with minimizing risk, perhaps subject to a cost or productivity constraint. Value creation in government ought to strive for consistency, coherency, and transparency. Achieving consistency and...

Minimum wage hikes express our sympathy for the working poor and our solidarity with them. But their importance is largely symbolic. The net effects of moderate increases in wage floors are vanishingly small. Statutory wage minimums work like taxes on labor, with their proceeds paid directly to...

An age-old issue is how inquiry and action can reciprocally contribute to transforming existing into preferred conditions. Leading scholars of a recent generation repeatedly addressed this general issue in human affairs. Herbert Simon's major proposal was to develop design-oriented sciences or,...

In recent years, scholars have developed new analytical tools and financial instruments that could help governments cope more effectively with financial volatility. In this essay we show how states can achieve fiscal sustainability using financial instruments based upon mean-variance analysis:...