Conceptualizing dysfunctional consequences of performance measurement in the public sector

ABSTRACT

Performance measurement (PM) has become increasingly popular in the management of public sector organizations (PSOs). This is somewhat paradoxical considering that PM has been criticized for having dysfunctional consequences. Although there are reasons to believe that PM may have dysfunctional consequences, when they occur has not been clarified. The aim of this research is to conceptualize the dysfunctional consequences of PM in PSOs. Based on complementarity theory and contingency theory we conclude that dysfunctional consequences of PM are a matter of interactions between PM design and PM use, between control practices in the control system and between PM and context.     

Public health insurance and optimal income taxation

If individuals differ not only in their inherent capacity to earn income, but also in the probability that they will fall ill, can subsidized public health insurance be justified on the grounds that it serves as an efficient tool to redistribute welfare? This question is analyzed in a model where the social welfare function is a weighted average of individual expected utilities, and where taxation is by a linear income tax. The answer is ‘yes’, except in certain special cases.     

Einzelbesprechungen

Ohne ZusammenfassungÜbersetzt von Erich Schiff, Wien.Übersetzt von Paul Brüll, Wien     

The Role of Market Orientation and Entrepreneurial Orientation for New Product Development Performance in Manufacturing Firms

The overall purpose of this article is to examine the relationships between two strategic orientations and performance in new product development. The first orientation considered is market orientation; the second one considered is entrepreneurial orientation, which reflects a firm’s propensity to innovate, to be proactive, as well as its willingness to take risks. Drawing upon a sample of 224 mid-sized manufacturing firms, multiple regressions with and without interaction terms were used for testing seven hypotheses. The results show that a market orientation and innovativeness were positively related to performance in new product development, while proactiveness and risk taking show no such relationship. The results also show that neither product characteristics nor environmental characteristics moderate these relationships. In terms of implications, our results suggest that contradictory and to some extent paradoxical capabilities are needed to increase performance in new product development, and that the different components of an entrepreneurial orientation do not impact new product development performance equally.     

Taxpayers' responsiveness to tax rate changes and implications for the cost of taxation in Sweden

Historically, labor supply elasticities have been used to evaluate tax policy and predict tax revenue effects. They are likely to underestimate taxpayers' response to tax rate changes, and hence to underestimate changes in potential tax revenues, however, because they measure only how taxpayers alter hours worked. Taxpayers can also respond to tax rate changes by altering, for instance, their work effort and form of compensation. An alternative measure that accounts for these responses as well as hours worked is the elasticity of taxable income. This paper estimates the elasticity of earned taxable income for Swedish taxpayers using two different approaches and a number of control variables and the 1990/1991 tax reform as a “natural experiment”. The preferred elasticity estimates fall in the range of 0.4–0.5, comparable with recent estimates for the U.S. and larger than most of the labor supply elasticity estimates used to evaluate tax policy in Scandinavia previously, which suggests that deadweight losses are two to three times higher than previously thought. JEL Classification H21 · H24 · H31 · J22