This three-essay dissertation examines how local governments manage sustainability policies/practices and how these actions are shaped by their organizational, social, and institutional environment. The first essay uses a 2015 Local Government Sustainability Practices Survey to investigate how social media shapes government sustainability plan and how its impact differs from other participatory mechanisms such as public hearings and advisory committees. Drawing from a theoretical framework of individualism-collectivism, the second essay uses data on local governments in the U.S. and Japan to conduct a cross-national comparative analysis. The study finds that governments embedded in a more individualism-oriented culture are more likely to adopt environmental management practices when facing growing external pressures. The final essay uses contingency theory to provide a dynamic view of how sustainability policies might be effectively integrated into the government’s working routines. It finds that the ways through which responsibility delegation affects policy implementation are contingent upon the government’s structural and cultural arrangement. Taken together, the dissertation coincides with the growing interest among public managers and researchers in enhancing government sustainability performance and outcomes. It provides an integrated and comprehensive investigation of the organizational, social, and institutional factors that shape the development and execution of sustainability policies and practices.

Local governments are creatures of their ecosystems. In this dissertation, institutional influences on local government finances are assessed both theoretically and empirically in this three-essay dissertation. Employing two tax and expenditure limitations (TELs) and local government form, this dissertation evaluates how these three components along with the local government ecology, influence financial outcomes around local fiscal condition, revenue capacity, and forecasting bias. First, this dissertation examines the effect of removing assessment restrictions on the solvency of local governments. As all TELs are not equivalent, expected impacts from assessment restrictions should be comparatively minimal. Using a multiple synthetic matching design, I match Minnesota municipalities against weighted counterfactuals before the lifting of assessment restrictions in 2011 and evaluate outcomes. Results indicate that municipal solvency was unaffected by a release from assessment restrictions. The second essay evaluates the moderating effect of voter support of TELs on property taxes. I propose that municipalities in favor of restrictions would have limited tax growth, even without restrictions; and oppositional constituencies face the greatest shift. Using voter support for the Taxpayer Bill of Rights Amendment in Colorado as a moderator, constituent preferences differentiate the change in property tax trends from implementation of the amendment. Employing both a Hausman-Taylor model and a comparative matching design, a significant relationship is found between the impact of property tax restrictions and the preferences of local government voters. In the last essay, I investigate an association between form of government and municipal revenue forecasting bias. Granting that a municipal governments form alters the nature of the governance that it provides; the essay presents that a reformed council-manager form of government would have lower revenue forecast bias via political pressure than a mayor-council form. Results from pooled ordinary least squares design indicate no statistically significant relationship between forecast bias and municipal form of government. The dissertation serves to illuminate, and eliminate, some institutional predictors of local government finances, and intones an ecological dominance over local government finance. Further, the dissertation provide significant nuance in how additional research can provide definitive answers on the effects of structural changes on the finances of local governments.

Previous studies of turnover have focused mainly on factors influencing turnover intention or turnover behavior. Fewer studies delve into career outcomes after individuals’ turnover. However, turnover is not the end of the decision-making process. Due to the boundaryless career (Arthur, 1994) and extensive job mobility in the modern workforce (Stewart, 2002), it is timely to know the effect of turnover on individual career evolvement. The three essays in this dissertation will delve into turnover and career outcomes using data of the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) personnel in the United States. The first essay explores the effect of past voluntary and involuntary turnover on individuals’ job satisfaction, salary, and number of people supervised. The second essay compares gender differences in voluntary turnover patterns and the effects of voluntary turnover on career outcomes. The third essay delves into STEM personnel job mobility across the public, private, and nonprofit sectors, with a focus on sector switch and job satisfaction change.

Research and Development (R&D) tax credits are one of the most widely adopted policies state governments use to incentivize R&D spending by firms operating in a state. R&D spending is associated with increases in firm productivity, innovation, and higher wages. However, most studies into these tax credits examine only the effect the credit has on firm-based R&D spending and assume the increases in R&D spending mean states are receiving the social and economic benefits endogenous growth theory predicts. This dissertation connects R&D tax credits with the expected outcomes of R&D spending increases to evaluate the efficacy of the tax credits. Specifically, the dissertation connects R&D tax credits to the movement of researchers between states, innovative activity, and state fiscal health. The study uses a panel of U.S. PhD graduates and a fixed-effects linear probability model to show R&D tax credits have a small but statistically significant impact on PhDs moving to states that have the tax credit. Using a structural equation model and a latent innovation variable, the dissertation shows R&D tax credits have a small but significant impact on innovative activity mediated by R&D spending. Finally, the dissertation examines the effect of R&D tax credits on a state’s short- and long-run fiscal health by using a distributed lag model to illustrate R&D tax credits are associated with decreases with fiscal health.

This dissertation consists of three essays, each examining distinct aspects about public organization adaptation to extreme events using evidence from public transit agencies under the influence of extreme weather in the United States (U.S.). The first essay focuses on predicting organizational adaptive behavior. Building on extant theories on adaptation and organizational learning, it develops a theoretical framework to uncover the pathways through which extreme events impact public organizations and identify the key learning mechanisms involved in adaptation. Using a structural equation model on data from a 2016 national survey, the study highlights the critical role of risk perception to translate signals from the external environment to organizational adaptive behavior.

The second essay expands on the first one to incorporate the organizational environment and model the adaptive system. Combining an agent-based model and qualitative interviews with key decision makers, the study investigates how adaptation occurs over time in multiplex contexts consisting of the natural hazards, organizations, institutions and social networks. The study ends with a series of refined propositions about the mechanisms involved in public organization adaptation. Specifically, the analysis suggests that risk perception needs to be examined relative to risk tolerance to determine organizational motivation to adapt, and underscore the criticality of coupling between the motivation and opportunities to enable adaptation. The results further show that the coupling can be enhanced through lowering organizational risk perception decay or synchronizing opportunities with extreme event occurrences to promote adaptation.

The third essay shifts the gaze from adaptation mechanisms to organizational outcomes. It uses a stochastic frontier analysis to quantify the impacts of extreme events on public organization performance and, importantly, the role of organizational adaptive capacity in moderating the impacts. The findings confirm that extreme events negatively affect organizational performance and that organizations with higher adaptive capacity are more able to mitigate those effects, thereby lending support to research efforts in the first two essays dedicated to identifying preconditions and mechanisms involved in the adaptation process. Taken together, this dissertation comprehensively advances understanding about public organization adaptation to extreme events.

One of the theoretical cores and values of good governance is the accountability of public employees, where the citizens expect the public employees to maintain professional standards, avoid conflicts of interest, respect the principles of fair and impartial treatment, and use public money wisely. However, are these unique moral standards to which only public employees are held? The dissertation seeks to examine how the public evaluates the unethical behaviors of public and private leaders differently to better understand the sources of public and private sector differences in the public’s normative evaluations.

Based on a randomized online vignette experiment with 1,569 respondents residing in the United States collected in Amazon’s Mechanical Turk platform, the dissertation confirms that public authorities face different levels of public tolerance relative to business managers. More specifically, the unethical behaviors of a public manager are less likely to be tolerated than the same misconduct of a business manager, while ethical offenses of elected officials are least likely to be tolerated by the public. However, the public is relatively much less tolerant of public managers’ and elected officials’ petty violations relative to business managers than they do for more egregious violations of public authorities.

The dissertation further finds that public evaluations are contingent upon the respondents’ work experience in different sectors. Individuals working in government are more likely to be tolerant of petty unethical behaviors, regardless of whom they evaluate, but they become much less tolerant of public managers’ and elected officials’ grand ethical violations. The longer individuals work in for-profit organizations, the less likely they are to tolerate public authorities’ petty violations of organizational rules while consistently being more accepting of the unethical behaviors of business managers.

Using an experimental design, the dissertation finds the importance of a fair and legitimate use of tax money in the public’s moral evaluations of public leadership and further discusses the potential sources of public skepticism of the public sector. Furthermore, the public and private sector comparison provides theoretical and practical implications for ethics reform in the era of collaborative governance.

This dissertation examines whether participatory budgeting (PB) processes, as a case of participatory governance and an innovative approach to local governance, promote inclusive and deliberative government decision-making and social justice outcomes. The first chapter introduces the case of the dissertation, PB in the city of Seoul, South Korea. It reviews the history of PB and the literature on PB in South Korea and discusses three issues that arise when implementing legally mandated PB. The second chapter explores whether inclusive PB processes redistribute financial resources even without the presence of explicit equity criteria, using the last four years of PB resource allocation data and employing multi-level statistical analysis. The findings show that having a more inclusive process to encourage citizen participation helps poorer districts to win more resources than wealthier ones. The third chapter is a follow-up exploratory study; the possible reasons behind the redistributive effects of PB are discussed using interview data with PB participants. The findings suggest that the PB process could have been redistributive because it provided an opportunity for the people living in the comparatively poorer neighborhoods to participate in the government decision-making process. Additionally, when scoring proposals, participants valued ‘needs’ and ‘urgency’ as the most important criteria. The last chapter examines the 32 PB meetings in order to find the combinations of conditions that lead to a deliberative participatory process, employing qualitative comparative analysis (QCA). This dissertation contributes to the field of public management, and particularly participatory governance by providing a review of the literature on PB in South Korea, presenting empirical evidence on the redistributive effect of PB without explicit equity criteria, and finding the combinations of meeting conditions that could be used to promote deliberation in the context of PB.