Robert Greer

• Texas A&M University

State and local governments seek to save money through fiscal efficiency. One such mechanism widely studied in the literature is through the choice for financial underwriting of debt. The extant literature generally suggests that state and local governments can lower borrowing costs through a competitive method of sale. In a meta‐analysis of 418 ef...

School district performance ratings are presented on intuitive grading scales. These ratings are widely publicized by local news outlets and can potentially influence voter behavior. Based on behavioral research applied to the local public finance context, we hypothesize that voters will anchor their votes in initial performance ratings even if the...

Errors in administrative processes cost clientele and organizations, yet are understudied. Beyond efficiency losses, errors impose administrative burdens on clientele. Automation is a common tool for reducing errors. Little is known, however, about the factors that may augment automation's effectiveness. We theorize that administrative errors are a...

Local governments consider a wide range of policies to increase resilience in the face of myriad risks and employ a variety of tactics to communicate about these policies to external actors. An important platform to signal resilience as a policy priority is through the budget process wherein local communities decide “who gets what, when, and how.”...

Scholars have long recognized the role of race and ethnicity in shaping the development and design of policy institutions in the United States, including social welfare policy. Beyond influencing the design of policy institutions, administrative discretion can disadvantage marginalized clientele in policy implementation. Building on previous work o...

Critical infrastructure systems that provide local public services are owned by a complicated array of public and private entities that are subject to disparate regulatory regimes. Determining whether and why performance differences between public and private service providers emerge in these different contexts is critical for understanding the eff...

Public–private partnerships (PPPs) have grown in popularity as a method to leverage private sector actors in the production of government services. With the global challenge of water insecurity, PPPs are becoming more common for large scale water infrastructure projects. One prominent example is the water desalination industry. Global desalination...

Purpose Public management researchers commonly model dichotomous dependent variables with parametric methods despite their relatively strong assumptions about the data generating process. Without testing for those assumptions and consideration of semiparametric alternatives, such as maximum score, estimates might be biased, or predictions might not...

The space governance landscape has shifted rapidly in recent years. As previous scholars have noted, this shifting environment has relied heavily on private actors and commercial interests. The space industry is now made up of not just a handful of nation states but also corporations large and small developing innovative technologies. These corpora...

The delivery of clean drinking water and the treatment of wastewater are critical public services, and in the United States, they are provided by a complex system of federal, state, and local governments. The process of water treatment and delivery requires significant investment in infrastructure both for initial capital requirements as well as th...

Managers of federal, state, local, and nonprofit organizations around the world are faced with the complex task of managing interconnected systems of scarce resources. One key example of this has been the recent research on the connections between water, energy, and food/agriculture, and the problem of managing these resources to be sustainable and...

The proliferation of special-purpose districts and the increasing complexity of local governance systems has been well documented. However, even as new special districts are created, others are being dissolved. This article investigates the extent to which both internal and external factors are at play in municipal utility district dissolutions. De...

The performance of energy service providers has important environmental and safety consequences in local communities. This paper uses a novel dataset compiled from operator reports and infrastructure monitoring data obtained from three different US federal agencies to assess the performance of retail gas utilities nationwide in terms of addressing...

Private placements continue to be issued in the municipal debt market and remain a topic of interest for municipalities, investors, and regulators. Private placements are often sold without an underwriter to relatively sophisticated investors and are typically “buy‐to‐hold” transactions. Therefore, compared with traditional competitive or negotiate...

The widespread proliferation of special districts and their role in producing and delivering public goods and services has been well documented. Each new entity further fragments government authority, and thus their autonomy is a critical determinant of how local governance systems function. Existing theories of special district autonomy emphasize...

Over the past 20 years, the subject of public management has received much attention. Although this research has clearly demonstrated relationships between management and performance in the public sector, there have been few attempts to incorporate the management of risk and its effect on performance. In this article, we seek to provide a discussio...

The Ecology of Games (EoG) theory couples institutional rational choice with social network theory, articulating how transaction costs, social capital, and collective action dilemmas shape networks and network outcomes in polycentric governance systems. EoG literature has often focused on social–relational ties across organizational boundaries. How...

Local government services are increasingly being provided in fragmented polycentric systems where the overlapping jurisdictions draw resources from the same fiscal base. Developing optimal policies for the efficient management of fiscal resources requires a consideration of the total underlying fiscal pool. In this study, we evaluate the impact tha...

The article investigates the relationship between environmental violations and water utility infrastructure investment in the Houston metropolitan area through a lens of institutional fragmentation. Special purpose water districts are highly capital-intensive service jurisdictions, which makes them extremely dependent on local fiscal capacity. Fisc...

Since the early 2000s, the U.S. federal government has placed increasing focus on combating improper payments. Implementing policies to control improper payments is no easy task. Federal programs are often large, complex, riddled with moral hazard concerns, and jointly implemented. In 2011, the U.S. Department of Labor adopted a national strategy t...

We examine the general factors that affect the distribution of debt among state and local governments. We measure the distribution as the percentage of total state and aggregate local debt that is issued or held by the state level of government. Using a fiscal federalism framework, we discuss the fiscal, legal, and political factors that play an im...

In consideration of increased levels of debt issued by special purpose local governments, this study explores the relationship between local government type and credit rating decisions. Investors use credit ratings as a signal for default risk, and risk level is a function of local economic base including service responsibilities and revenue source...

To resolve the limited access to capital by local governments due to the Great Recession, the United States Federal Government responded with the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) which included the Build America Bond (BAB) program. The result of this program was considerable interest cost savings to state and local governments, but man...

In a complex federalist system, the interactions across levels of government have important fiscal implications. Municipal debt has become increasingly important as local governments turn to tax-backed bonds as a significant source of funds. In a system of local governments that have overlapping borders, fiscal interactions become a factor in issui...