Ole Helby Petersen
Biographic Data
| ID | 1731005 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Ole Helby Petersen |
| GIVEN NAMES | Ole Helby |
| FAMILY NAME | Petersen |
| SIGNATURE | PETERSEN O H |
| AFFILIATIONS | Roskilde University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4415-6608 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 23 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 48 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 23 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2013 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Market failure in a universal welfare state? Ownership, quality, and regulation in Danish social services
Like many other countries, Denmark has recently seen a sharp increase in outsourced social service provision for children and adults. While quasi-market theory suggests that complex social services could be ill-suited to market provision, there has been little assessment of how ownership relates to service quality for welfare services due to fragmented data. This paper presents findings from a population-wide analysis of quality and inspection ou…
More Random Than Not? A Review of the Logic of Inference in Experimental Public Administration
The emphasis on causal inference within public administration research has spurred a proliferation of experimental studies, primarily due to the internal validity attributed to effects inferred from random assignment of treatment conditions. Still, many experimental studies include findings based not only random assignment, but also on a variety of other logics of inference. This study examines the logic of inference in experimental public admini…
Skills and knowledge for public contract management: A taxonomy and integrative framework
Public sector contracting represents a major share of government spending worldwide and is crucial for the effective management of public resources. Like many other government functions, contracting requires a highly skilled and knowledgeable workforce to perform effectively. However, little conceptual research has addressed the human resources for contract management in the public sector. This article integrates the public sector contracting and…
Co-producing field experiments in public management research: A guide to enhanced research–practice collaboration
Field experiments have great potential for examining causes and effects in public management research. However, field experiments pose unique challenges, including developing and maintaining support from public managers and organizations. We offer a guide to the design, planning, and implementation of collaborative field experiments for scholars looking to move from initial interest to action. Focusing on five key phases of the research process, …
Interpreting performance information: Motivated reasoning or unbiased comprehension? A replication and extension
Despite a growing number of studies on how prior beliefs distort citizens' interpretation of performance information for service providers, little is known about whether prior beliefs matter equally across different services and types of providers. In this study, we provide a wide replication and extension of the experimental design used in Baekgaard and Serritzlew (2016) with three types of providers (public, non‐profit, and for‐profit) across t…
Insourcing public services: Consequences for wages and employment
After decades of private companies delivering public services, governments are increasingly using a mix of outsourcing and insourcing to provide services. With insourcing, governments replace market competition with public monopoly and concentrated private ownership with more dispersed public ownership. Despite these fundamental changes in competition and ownership, little is known theoretically and empirically about how insourcing affects employ…
The Unequal Distribution of Consequences of Contracting Out: Female, Low-skilled, and Young Workers Pay the Highest Price
While the public and private labor markets are marked by significant differences in the institutions of wage formation, very few studies have examined workers’ wages and employment in the public and private sectors when solving the same tasks. Focusing on government contracting out, we examine the changes in work income, employment, and government income benefits when public workers are transferred from a public to a private employer due to contr…
Privatization of Public Services: A Systematic Review of Quality Differences between Public and Private Daycare Providers
The administrative burden of doing business with the government: Learning and compliance costs in Business‐Government interactions
Administrative burdens are widespread and likely to generate unequal opportunities in access to government programs and other important entitlements. Whereas a large body of research has examined administrative burdens in citizen‐state encounters, little is known either theoretically or empirically about burdens in business–government interactions. In this article, we argue that private businesses, just like individual citizens, experience admini…
Same product, different price: Experimental evidence on the transaction cost expenditures of selling to governments and firms
Whether governments pay more than firms when contracting has been an important and stubbornly vexing question in public management. One challenge has been finding ways to credibly compare the costs of engaging in market transactions with governments versus firms. In this paper, we systematically compare the costs of contracting when governments and firms buy the same product under the same circumstances. Using data from a randomized experiment of…
Competition, Ownership, and the Impact of Government Outsourcing on Employees
Government outsourcing to third-party vendors is widespread and intended to strengthen the organizational incentive to deliver public services more efficiently. However, it is unclear how outsourcing influences the public workforce, and little is known about the effect on employees who change from working for the government to working for the vendor receiving the outsourcing contract. In this article, we theoretically argue that the introduction …
Evaluating the Costs, Quality, and Value for Money of Infrastructure Public‐private Partnerships: A Systematic Literature Review
Public‒private partnerships (PPPs) are often promoted as a means to lower the costs and increase the quality and value for money (VfM) of public construction and infrastructure projects. While the increasing capital stock of PPPs warrants evaluation of their performance there has until now been limited systematic assessment of PPP versus conventional public procurement. This article contributes to the literature by presenting the findings of a sy…
Measuring and Managing Ex Ante Transaction Costs in Public Sector Contracting
Transaction cost attributes, such as the complexity of the product being purchased, shape the risk that government contracts will fail. When transaction cost risks are particularly strong, a common prescription is to avoid contracting altogether or, if it is unavoidable, to spend additional resources on contract management activities. This article presents evidence on the size and variability of governments' ex ante transaction cost spending, usi…
Motivational Foundations of Public Service Provision: Towards a Theoretical Synthesis
Integrating theoretical perspectives is very useful when we investigate an empirical phenomenon, and this article demonstrates how employee motivation can be understood based on principal-agent, self-determination, and prosocial theories. Employee motivation can be conceptualized as either extrinsic, autonomous or prosocial or a combination thereof, and a theoretical synthesis allows us to understand this complexity without losing too much cohere…
Is Contracting out of Public Services still the Great Panacea? A Systematic Review of Studies on Economic and Quality Effects from 2000 to 2014
This article presents the results of a systematic review of international studies on economic and quality effects of contracting out published in the period from 2000 to 2014. We conducted a comprehensive search of the literature and identified 49 relevant studies. There are three main findings of the systematic review: (1) cost savings documented in international contracting out literature have been decreasing over time; (2) cost savings have be…
Understanding the Relationship Between Infrastructure Public‒private Partnerships and Innovation
While the contemporary academic discourse regards innovation as an inherent feature of infrastructure public‒private partnerships (PPPs), the conceptual link between infrastructure PPPs and innovation is narrowly understood. While most existing studies conceptualize the innovation processes and effects within the context of PPP projects, we argue that the relevance of innovation in infrastructure PPPs goes beyond specific projects. In this concep…
Contracting out local road and park services: Economic Effects and Their Strategic, Contractual and Competitive Conditions
The economic rationale for contracting out local services is increasingly contested by empirical research. This article aims to contribute to this literature, first by scrutinising the economic effects of contracting out in local road and park services and, second, by exploring how characteristics such as markets, contracts, municipal strategies and contracting history influence these outcomes. Drawing on original survey data from Danish municipa…
Public/private ownership and quality of care: Evidence from Danish nursing homes
Enhancing Public Innovation by Transforming Public Governance
Rising and changing citizen expectations, dire fiscal constraints, unfulfilled political aspirations, high professional ambitions, and a growing number of stubborn societal problems have generated an increasing demand for innovation of public policies and services. Drawing on the latest research, this book examines how current systems of public governance can be transformed in order to enhance public innovation. It scrutinizes the need for new ro…
Public–private partnerships (PPPs) in local services: Risk-sharing and private delivery of water services in Spain
Local governments are increasingly utilising the public–private partnership (PPP) model as a means of organising service delivery in the public–private domain. This article examines the experiences with construction and operation of 131 PPP wastewater treatment plants in the region of Aragon, Spain. The study highlights how an inadequate management of construction risk and unsuitable transfer of demand and revenue risk resulted in significant tim…
National Varieties of Public–Private Partnerships (PPPs): A Comparative Analysis of PPP-Supporting Units in 19 European Countries
Most countries that have adopted the public–private partnership (PPP) model as a means of implementing infrastructure projects have launched dedicated supporting units to guide policy development and stimulate project implementation. This paper draws on the theoretical notion of PPP-enabling fields to carry out a comparative analysis of the roles and functions of PPP-supporting units across 19 European countries with varying PPP experiences. We d…
Contracting Out Local Services: A Tale of Technical and Social Services
Governments face a fundamental choice between in‐house production and contracting out for the delivery of services to citizens. This article examines the importance of ideology, fiscal pressure, and size for contracting out in technical and social services. The analysis builds on a panel data set covering municipal spending on services in all 98 Danish municipalities. The authors find that contracting out is shaped by ideology in social services …
Marketization of welfare services in Scandinavia: A review of Swedish and Danish experiences
Scandinavian welfare states are undergoing a gradual transformation towards a more market-based mode of public service delivery. The results of these marketization reforms are, however, insufficiently documented in terms of their consequences for the price and quality of welfare services. This article presents the findings of a systematic review of Danish and Swedish experiences with private provision of welfare services within three areas: home …
Competition, Ownership, and the Impact of Government Outsourcing on Employees
Government outsourcing to third-party vendors is widespread and intended to strengthen the organizational incentive to deliver public services more efficiently. However, it is unclear how outsourcing influences the public workforce, and little is known about the effect on employees who change from working for the government to working for the vendor receiving the outsourcing contract. In this article, we theoretically argue that the introduction …
The administrative burden of doing business with the government: Learning and compliance costs in Business‐Government interactions
Administrative burdens are widespread and likely to generate unequal opportunities in access to government programs and other important entitlements. Whereas a large body of research has examined administrative burdens in citizen‐state encounters, little is known either theoretically or empirically about burdens in business–government interactions. In this article, we argue that private businesses, just like individual citizens, experience admini…
Evaluating the Costs, Quality, and Value for Money of Infrastructure Public‐private Partnerships: A Systematic Literature Review
Public‒private partnerships (PPPs) are often promoted as a means to lower the costs and increase the quality and value for money (VfM) of public construction and infrastructure projects. While the increasing capital stock of PPPs warrants evaluation of their performance there has until now been limited systematic assessment of PPP versus conventional public procurement. This article contributes to the literature by presenting the findings of a sy…
Public–private partnerships (PPPs) in local services: Risk-sharing and private delivery of water services in Spain
Local governments are increasingly utilising the public–private partnership (PPP) model as a means of organising service delivery in the public–private domain. This article examines the experiences with construction and operation of 131 PPP wastewater treatment plants in the region of Aragon, Spain. The study highlights how an inadequate management of construction risk and unsuitable transfer of demand and revenue risk resulted in significant tim…
Contracting out local road and park services: Economic Effects and Their Strategic, Contractual and Competitive Conditions
The economic rationale for contracting out local services is increasingly contested by empirical research. This article aims to contribute to this literature, first by scrutinising the economic effects of contracting out in local road and park services and, second, by exploring how characteristics such as markets, contracts, municipal strategies and contracting history influence these outcomes. Drawing on original survey data from Danish municipa…
Public/private ownership and quality of care: Evidence from Danish nursing homes
The Unequal Distribution of Consequences of Contracting Out: Female, Low-skilled, and Young Workers Pay the Highest Price
While the public and private labor markets are marked by significant differences in the institutions of wage formation, very few studies have examined workers’ wages and employment in the public and private sectors when solving the same tasks. Focusing on government contracting out, we examine the changes in work income, employment, and government income benefits when public workers are transferred from a public to a private employer due to contr…
National Varieties of Public–Private Partnerships (PPPs): A Comparative Analysis of PPP-Supporting Units in 19 European Countries
Most countries that have adopted the public–private partnership (PPP) model as a means of implementing infrastructure projects have launched dedicated supporting units to guide policy development and stimulate project implementation. This paper draws on the theoretical notion of PPP-enabling fields to carry out a comparative analysis of the roles and functions of PPP-supporting units across 19 European countries with varying PPP experiences. We d…
Interpreting performance information: Motivated reasoning or unbiased comprehension? A replication and extension
Despite a growing number of studies on how prior beliefs distort citizens' interpretation of performance information for service providers, little is known about whether prior beliefs matter equally across different services and types of providers. In this study, we provide a wide replication and extension of the experimental design used in Baekgaard and Serritzlew (2016) with three types of providers (public, non‐profit, and for‐profit) across t…
Marketization of welfare services in Scandinavia: A review of Swedish and Danish experiences
Scandinavian welfare states are undergoing a gradual transformation towards a more market-based mode of public service delivery. The results of these marketization reforms are, however, insufficiently documented in terms of their consequences for the price and quality of welfare services. This article presents the findings of a systematic review of Danish and Swedish experiences with private provision of welfare services within three areas: home …
National Varieties of Public–Private Partnerships (PPPs): A Comparative Analysis of PPP-Supporting Units in 19 European Countries
Most countries that have adopted the public–private partnership (PPP) model as a means of implementing infrastructure projects have launched dedicated supporting units to guide policy development and stimulate project implementation. This paper draws on the theoretical notion of PPP-enabling fields to carry out a comparative analysis of the roles and functions of PPP-supporting units across 19 European countries with varying PPP experiences. We d…
Contracting Out Local Services: A Tale of Technical and Social Services
Governments face a fundamental choice between in‐house production and contracting out for the delivery of services to citizens. This article examines the importance of ideology, fiscal pressure, and size for contracting out in technical and social services. The analysis builds on a panel data set covering municipal spending on services in all 98 Danish municipalities. The authors find that contracting out is shaped by ideology in social services …
Enhancing Public Innovation by Transforming Public Governance
Rising and changing citizen expectations, dire fiscal constraints, unfulfilled political aspirations, high professional ambitions, and a growing number of stubborn societal problems have generated an increasing demand for innovation of public policies and services. Drawing on the latest research, this book examines how current systems of public governance can be transformed in order to enhance public innovation. It scrutinizes the need for new ro…
Public–private partnerships (PPPs) in local services: Risk-sharing and private delivery of water services in Spain
Local governments are increasingly utilising the public–private partnership (PPP) model as a means of organising service delivery in the public–private domain. This article examines the experiences with construction and operation of 131 PPP wastewater treatment plants in the region of Aragon, Spain. The study highlights how an inadequate management of construction risk and unsuitable transfer of demand and revenue risk resulted in significant tim…
Motivational Foundations of Public Service Provision: Towards a Theoretical Synthesis
Integrating theoretical perspectives is very useful when we investigate an empirical phenomenon, and this article demonstrates how employee motivation can be understood based on principal-agent, self-determination, and prosocial theories. Employee motivation can be conceptualized as either extrinsic, autonomous or prosocial or a combination thereof, and a theoretical synthesis allows us to understand this complexity without losing too much cohere…
Is Contracting out of Public Services still the Great Panacea? A Systematic Review of Studies on Economic and Quality Effects from 2000 to 2014
This article presents the results of a systematic review of international studies on economic and quality effects of contracting out published in the period from 2000 to 2014. We conducted a comprehensive search of the literature and identified 49 relevant studies. There are three main findings of the systematic review: (1) cost savings documented in international contracting out literature have been decreasing over time; (2) cost savings have be…
Understanding the Relationship Between Infrastructure Public‒private Partnerships and Innovation
While the contemporary academic discourse regards innovation as an inherent feature of infrastructure public‒private partnerships (PPPs), the conceptual link between infrastructure PPPs and innovation is narrowly understood. While most existing studies conceptualize the innovation processes and effects within the context of PPP projects, we argue that the relevance of innovation in infrastructure PPPs goes beyond specific projects. In this concep…
Contracting out local road and park services: Economic Effects and Their Strategic, Contractual and Competitive Conditions
The economic rationale for contracting out local services is increasingly contested by empirical research. This article aims to contribute to this literature, first by scrutinising the economic effects of contracting out in local road and park services and, second, by exploring how characteristics such as markets, contracts, municipal strategies and contracting history influence these outcomes. Drawing on original survey data from Danish municipa…
Public/private ownership and quality of care: Evidence from Danish nursing homes
Evaluating the Costs, Quality, and Value for Money of Infrastructure Public‐private Partnerships: A Systematic Literature Review
Public‒private partnerships (PPPs) are often promoted as a means to lower the costs and increase the quality and value for money (VfM) of public construction and infrastructure projects. While the increasing capital stock of PPPs warrants evaluation of their performance there has until now been limited systematic assessment of PPP versus conventional public procurement. This article contributes to the literature by presenting the findings of a sy…
Measuring and Managing Ex Ante Transaction Costs in Public Sector Contracting
Transaction cost attributes, such as the complexity of the product being purchased, shape the risk that government contracts will fail. When transaction cost risks are particularly strong, a common prescription is to avoid contracting altogether or, if it is unavoidable, to spend additional resources on contract management activities. This article presents evidence on the size and variability of governments' ex ante transaction cost spending, usi…
Privatization of Public Services: A Systematic Review of Quality Differences between Public and Private Daycare Providers
The administrative burden of doing business with the government: Learning and compliance costs in Business‐Government interactions
Administrative burdens are widespread and likely to generate unequal opportunities in access to government programs and other important entitlements. Whereas a large body of research has examined administrative burdens in citizen‐state encounters, little is known either theoretically or empirically about burdens in business–government interactions. In this article, we argue that private businesses, just like individual citizens, experience admini…
Same product, different price: Experimental evidence on the transaction cost expenditures of selling to governments and firms
Whether governments pay more than firms when contracting has been an important and stubbornly vexing question in public management. One challenge has been finding ways to credibly compare the costs of engaging in market transactions with governments versus firms. In this paper, we systematically compare the costs of contracting when governments and firms buy the same product under the same circumstances. Using data from a randomized experiment of…
Competition, Ownership, and the Impact of Government Outsourcing on Employees
Government outsourcing to third-party vendors is widespread and intended to strengthen the organizational incentive to deliver public services more efficiently. However, it is unclear how outsourcing influences the public workforce, and little is known about the effect on employees who change from working for the government to working for the vendor receiving the outsourcing contract. In this article, we theoretically argue that the introduction …
Interpreting performance information: Motivated reasoning or unbiased comprehension? A replication and extension
Despite a growing number of studies on how prior beliefs distort citizens' interpretation of performance information for service providers, little is known about whether prior beliefs matter equally across different services and types of providers. In this study, we provide a wide replication and extension of the experimental design used in Baekgaard and Serritzlew (2016) with three types of providers (public, non‐profit, and for‐profit) across t…
Insourcing public services: Consequences for wages and employment
After decades of private companies delivering public services, governments are increasingly using a mix of outsourcing and insourcing to provide services. With insourcing, governments replace market competition with public monopoly and concentrated private ownership with more dispersed public ownership. Despite these fundamental changes in competition and ownership, little is known theoretically and empirically about how insourcing affects employ…
The Unequal Distribution of Consequences of Contracting Out: Female, Low-skilled, and Young Workers Pay the Highest Price
While the public and private labor markets are marked by significant differences in the institutions of wage formation, very few studies have examined workers’ wages and employment in the public and private sectors when solving the same tasks. Focusing on government contracting out, we examine the changes in work income, employment, and government income benefits when public workers are transferred from a public to a private employer due to contr…
Co-producing field experiments in public management research: A guide to enhanced research–practice collaboration
Field experiments have great potential for examining causes and effects in public management research. However, field experiments pose unique challenges, including developing and maintaining support from public managers and organizations. We offer a guide to the design, planning, and implementation of collaborative field experiments for scholars looking to move from initial interest to action. Focusing on five key phases of the research process, …
More Random Than Not? A Review of the Logic of Inference in Experimental Public Administration
The emphasis on causal inference within public administration research has spurred a proliferation of experimental studies, primarily due to the internal validity attributed to effects inferred from random assignment of treatment conditions. Still, many experimental studies include findings based not only random assignment, but also on a variety of other logics of inference. This study examines the logic of inference in experimental public admini…
Skills and knowledge for public contract management: A taxonomy and integrative framework
Public sector contracting represents a major share of government spending worldwide and is crucial for the effective management of public resources. Like many other government functions, contracting requires a highly skilled and knowledgeable workforce to perform effectively. However, little conceptual research has addressed the human resources for contract management in the public sector. This article integrates the public sector contracting and…
Market failure in a universal welfare state? Ownership, quality, and regulation in Danish social services
Like many other countries, Denmark has recently seen a sharp increase in outsourced social service provision for children and adults. While quasi-market theory suggests that complex social services could be ill-suited to market provision, there has been little assessment of how ownership relates to service quality for welfare services due to fragmented data. This paper presents findings from a population-wide analysis of quality and inspection ou…
Business (17 works) · Economics (11 works) · Public Procurement and Policy (11 works) · Political science (10 works) · Public-Private Partnership Projects (10 works) · Computer Science (7 works) · Public Policy and Administration Research (6 works) · Finance (5 works) · Public Administration (5 works) · Sociology (5 works)