J S Butler
Biographic Data
| ID | 50065 |
|---|---|
| NAME | J S Butler |
| GIVEN NAMES | J S |
| FAMILY NAME | Butler |
| SIGNATURE | BUTLER J S |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Kentucky |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3778-7500 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 25 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 98 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 25 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1982 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
A novel research method to detect punctuation and its application to bureaucratic decision‐making
Punctuated equilibrium theory (PET) suggests that policy processes experience periods of stability interrupted by dramatic change. Most previous studies have used kurtosis, distribution tests, or change categorization to assess punctuation, but these methods provide limited information. We propose a novel approach that statistically determines the cutoff between small and large changes, assuming small changes follow a normal distribution and larg…
Understanding Public Participation as a Mechanism Affecting Government Fiscal Outcomes: Theory and Evidence From Participatory Budgeting
This study aims to advance our knowledge about the role of public participation in formulating budgetary decisions of local governments. By focusing on participatory budgeting as a prominent form of public participation in the budgetary process, we posit that participatory budgeting serves two important roles in aligning the fiscal outcomes of local governments with citizen preferences: (1) increased transparency of the local budget and (2) impro…
The effects of high-quality financial reporting on municipal bond ratings: Evidence from US local governments
While credit rating agencies mention that a government factor is one criterion for assessing municipal bond ratings, current studies on credit ratings offer relatively little evidence as to how the government factor affects municipal bond ratings, compared to socioeconomic and financial factors. By utilising the award of the Certificate of Achievement for Excellence in Financial Reporting Programme of the Government Finance Officers Association a…
State Fiscal Constraints and Local Responses: Evidence from the Property Tax Limit Overrides in Massachusetts
This research examines the determinants of the likelihood of property tax limit override attempts and successes in the context of Massachusetts's Proposition 21⁄2. The authors apply the “Leviathan” government theory, median voter theory, and agenda‐setting theory to develop theoretical expectations and use data from Massachusetts municipalities for 1991–2013 as a sample for empirical tests. Override attempts are not randomly proposed; therefore, …
Lobbying, learning and policy reinvention: An examination of the American States’ drunk driving laws
Scholars have consistently shown that learning of successful policies in other states leads to higher likelihood of policy adoption. This study extends this finding two ways. First, policy learning can also lead to more comprehensive adoption of successful policies. Second, the effect of policy learning on policy comprehensiveness is conditional on lobbying by interest groups, an alternative source of information about policy success. To test the…
Dividing the Pie: Parties, Institutional Limits, and State Budget Trade-Offs
Although many studies on budgetary outcomes of state politics focus on budget sizes, budget trade-off studies focus on budget composition. This study examines the role of state politics in explaining budget trade-offs. We apply Peterson's typology to analyze budget trade-offs among developmental, allocational, redistributive, and educational expenditures. We focus on the roles of partisan and ideological factors and their interactive effects with…
The Determinants of Municipal Structures on a Political-Administrative Dimension
Adjusting municipal structures and cross-adoption of structural characteristics between mayor-council and council-manager municipalities have been common in the United States in recent decades. This research investigates seven essential structural characteristics of U.S. municipalities and constructs a municipal structure political-administrative index. We attempt to examine the determinants of municipal structures on a political-administrative d…
The Spreading of Innovation: State Adoptions of Energy and Climate Change Policy
The American states are engaged in a variety of policy efforts to mitigate climate change and alter energy usage. While a number of studies have considered the reasons for adoption of renewable energy and climate change policies, they typically consider only one policy in isolation. This study examines policy adoption of 14 energy and climate change programs in a pooled event history analysis. Our primary research questions consider average effec…
Choice in a World of New School Types
As school choice options have evolved over recent years, it is important to understand what family and school factors are associated with the enrollment decisions families make. Use of restricted‐access data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study allowed us to identify household location from a nationally representative sample of students and to match households to the actual schools attended and other nearby schools. This matching is signif…
Public Employee Quality in a Geographic Context: A Study of Rural Teachers
Recruiting high quality employees is one of the key functions of public human resource managers and a critical component of effective public service delivery. This is particularly true in education but little is known about public sector or teacher hiring patterns in areas that are predominantly rural, poor, and isolated from other locales. This article begins to fill that gap. We find that rural educational agencies employ the new teachers of lo…
Why Do Women Enter and Exit From Material Hardship
Current critiques of the official federal poverty measure have led to a growing interest in alternative measures of well-being, such as individual reports of the inability to meet basic needs. This article considers a wide set of risk factors for four different forms of material hardship (food insufficiency, utility disconnection, unmet medical needs, and housing problems) using data from a panel study of single mothers. Specifically, the authors…
AdoptUsKids national photolisting service: Characteristics of listed children and length of time to placement
Levels and Long-Term Trends in Earnings Inequality: Overcoming Current Population Survey Censoring Problems Using the GB2 Distribution
Over its history, the March Current Population Survey (CPS) has increasingly captured the upper tail of the distribution of all sources of income. This, together with time-consistency problems in top coding, means that users of both the public-use and restricted-access CPS will understate the level of wage earnings and income inequality in earlier years and overstate their growth over time. We address this problem by modeling the personal earning…
Time dependence and unmeasured heterogeneity in administrative data analysis: Application to adoption photolisting services data
Taxing Losses: Economic Suicide or Shrewd Trade Policy
The ancient Nabateans had an economic law that penalized those who diminished and rewarded those who increased the common property. Normally, such a law could reduce long-run growth, but the Nabateans flourished. In the context of their nearly pure trade economy, this law enhanced the city of Petra's ability to accumulate wealth by discouraging competitive price reductions (a strategic trade policy). Under general assumptions, the policy would al…
Timeliness in the Adoptive Placement of Photolisted Children: The New York State Blue Books
This study uses information from the New York State (NYS) Adoption Photolisting Service, the Blue Books, to determine the characteristics of the hardest-to-place children, factors related to timeliness in the adoptive placement of listed children, and the efficacy of photolisting updates in impacting placement probabilities. The data for this study consist of computerized records on all children photolisted in NYS from 1976 to 1997. Results indic…
Labour supply and wages among nuclear and extended households: The Surinamese experiment
This article explores labour market behaviour of members of extended and nuclear households in Suriname. Previous analyses have found that co‐operative childcare opportunities within the extended household increase female labour force participation. Such coordination implies correlated participation decisions, which invalidates standard assumptions made in estimating participation with probits and wages with regressions. We employ a GMM estimatio…
Tests of the Specification of Univariate and Bivariate Ordered Probit
This note presents tests of the specification of univariate and bivariate ordered probit. The test is sensitive to deviations from either normality or the exogeneity of the explanatory variables. As an example, the ownership of dogs and televisions, both sources of time-intensive entertainment, is studied. The specification for dogs is not rejected, the specification for televisions is rejected at the 2.0% level, and the specification of both tog…
Estimating the Correlation in Censored Probit Models
The estimation of censored probit models can result in an estimated correlation between the disturbances approaching [plus]1.0 or -1.0 when most of the observations are selected into the sample and the outcomes are unequally distributed. Outcomes of 0 can induce an estimated correlation of -1.0, and outcomes of 1 can induce an estimated correlation of [plus]1.0. This paper analyzes the population problem, derives corresponding sample conditions, …
Maximum score estimates of the determinants of residential mobility: Implications for the value of residential attachment and neighborhood amenities
A Simultaneous Analysis of Grievance Activity and Outcome Decisions
The authors develop an approach for simultaneously analyzing the determinants of grievance filing activity and grievance outcomes at each stage of the grievance process. The value of this approach is demonstrated by an analysis of grievance data from a Canadian private sector firm for the years 1980–81, which shows that the determinants of the propensity to file a grievance (such as the subject matter of the grievance and past grievance filing ac…
Work and Health after Retirement: A Competing Risks Model with Semiparametric Unobserved Heterogeneity
J. S. Butler, Kathryn H. Anderson, Richard V. Burkhauser, Work and Health after Retirement: A Competing Risks Model with Semiparametric Unobserved Heterogeneity, The Review of Economics and Statistics, Vol. 71, No. 1 (Feb., 1989), pp. 46-53
Measurement Error in Self-Reported Health Variables
Measurement error may be an important source of bias in studies using self-reported health indicators to explain work behavior. As a test of measurement error, the tetrachoric correlation coefficient is used to examine the relationship between two alternative measures of arthritis, a standard self-reported measure and a simulated clinical measure. While the two measures are highly correlated, measurement error is found. Regression analysis demons…
Age at marriage in Malaysia
A Computationally Efficient Quadrature Procedure for the One-Factor Multinomial Probit Model
A PROBLEM OF ESTIMATION that has long confronted many economists is the difficulty of estimating the parameters of equations with limited dependent variables on cross-section time-series (i.e., panel) data. While there are widely available packaged computer programs for estimating either (a) cross-section probit and Tobit models or (b) simple permanent-transitory, random-effects panel models with continuous dependent variables, there are no avail…
The Spreading of Innovation: State Adoptions of Energy and Climate Change Policy
The American states are engaged in a variety of policy efforts to mitigate climate change and alter energy usage. While a number of studies have considered the reasons for adoption of renewable energy and climate change policies, they typically consider only one policy in isolation. This study examines policy adoption of 14 energy and climate change programs in a pooled event history analysis. Our primary research questions consider average effec…
Lobbying, learning and policy reinvention: An examination of the American States’ drunk driving laws
Scholars have consistently shown that learning of successful policies in other states leads to higher likelihood of policy adoption. This study extends this finding two ways. First, policy learning can also lead to more comprehensive adoption of successful policies. Second, the effect of policy learning on policy comprehensiveness is conditional on lobbying by interest groups, an alternative source of information about policy success. To test the…
Why Do Women Enter and Exit From Material Hardship
Current critiques of the official federal poverty measure have led to a growing interest in alternative measures of well-being, such as individual reports of the inability to meet basic needs. This article considers a wide set of risk factors for four different forms of material hardship (food insufficiency, utility disconnection, unmet medical needs, and housing problems) using data from a panel study of single mothers. Specifically, the authors…
Maximum score estimates of the determinants of residential mobility: Implications for the value of residential attachment and neighborhood amenities
Dividing the Pie: Parties, Institutional Limits, and State Budget Trade-Offs
Although many studies on budgetary outcomes of state politics focus on budget sizes, budget trade-off studies focus on budget composition. This study examines the role of state politics in explaining budget trade-offs. We apply Peterson's typology to analyze budget trade-offs among developmental, allocational, redistributive, and educational expenditures. We focus on the roles of partisan and ideological factors and their interactive effects with…
The Determinants of Municipal Structures on a Political-Administrative Dimension
Adjusting municipal structures and cross-adoption of structural characteristics between mayor-council and council-manager municipalities have been common in the United States in recent decades. This research investigates seven essential structural characteristics of U.S. municipalities and constructs a municipal structure political-administrative index. We attempt to examine the determinants of municipal structures on a political-administrative d…
Choice in a World of New School Types
As school choice options have evolved over recent years, it is important to understand what family and school factors are associated with the enrollment decisions families make. Use of restricted‐access data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study allowed us to identify household location from a nationally representative sample of students and to match households to the actual schools attended and other nearby schools. This matching is signif…
Public Employee Quality in a Geographic Context: A Study of Rural Teachers
Recruiting high quality employees is one of the key functions of public human resource managers and a critical component of effective public service delivery. This is particularly true in education but little is known about public sector or teacher hiring patterns in areas that are predominantly rural, poor, and isolated from other locales. This article begins to fill that gap. We find that rural educational agencies employ the new teachers of lo…
Understanding Public Participation as a Mechanism Affecting Government Fiscal Outcomes: Theory and Evidence From Participatory Budgeting
This study aims to advance our knowledge about the role of public participation in formulating budgetary decisions of local governments. By focusing on participatory budgeting as a prominent form of public participation in the budgetary process, we posit that participatory budgeting serves two important roles in aligning the fiscal outcomes of local governments with citizen preferences: (1) increased transparency of the local budget and (2) impro…
The effects of high-quality financial reporting on municipal bond ratings: Evidence from US local governments
While credit rating agencies mention that a government factor is one criterion for assessing municipal bond ratings, current studies on credit ratings offer relatively little evidence as to how the government factor affects municipal bond ratings, compared to socioeconomic and financial factors. By utilising the award of the Certificate of Achievement for Excellence in Financial Reporting Programme of the Government Finance Officers Association a…
Age at marriage in Malaysia
Timeliness in the Adoptive Placement of Photolisted Children: The New York State Blue Books
This study uses information from the New York State (NYS) Adoption Photolisting Service, the Blue Books, to determine the characteristics of the hardest-to-place children, factors related to timeliness in the adoptive placement of listed children, and the efficacy of photolisting updates in impacting placement probabilities. The data for this study consist of computerized records on all children photolisted in NYS from 1976 to 1997. Results indic…
A Computationally Efficient Quadrature Procedure for the One-Factor Multinomial Probit Model
A PROBLEM OF ESTIMATION that has long confronted many economists is the difficulty of estimating the parameters of equations with limited dependent variables on cross-section time-series (i.e., panel) data. While there are widely available packaged computer programs for estimating either (a) cross-section probit and Tobit models or (b) simple permanent-transitory, random-effects panel models with continuous dependent variables, there are no avail…
Measurement Error in Self-Reported Health Variables
Measurement error may be an important source of bias in studies using self-reported health indicators to explain work behavior. As a test of measurement error, the tetrachoric correlation coefficient is used to examine the relationship between two alternative measures of arthritis, a standard self-reported measure and a simulated clinical measure. While the two measures are highly correlated, measurement error is found. Regression analysis demons…
Age at marriage in Malaysia
Work and Health after Retirement: A Competing Risks Model with Semiparametric Unobserved Heterogeneity
J. S. Butler, Kathryn H. Anderson, Richard V. Burkhauser, Work and Health after Retirement: A Competing Risks Model with Semiparametric Unobserved Heterogeneity, The Review of Economics and Statistics, Vol. 71, No. 1 (Feb., 1989), pp. 46-53
Maximum score estimates of the determinants of residential mobility: Implications for the value of residential attachment and neighborhood amenities
A Simultaneous Analysis of Grievance Activity and Outcome Decisions
The authors develop an approach for simultaneously analyzing the determinants of grievance filing activity and grievance outcomes at each stage of the grievance process. The value of this approach is demonstrated by an analysis of grievance data from a Canadian private sector firm for the years 1980–81, which shows that the determinants of the propensity to file a grievance (such as the subject matter of the grievance and past grievance filing ac…
Estimating the Correlation in Censored Probit Models
The estimation of censored probit models can result in an estimated correlation between the disturbances approaching [plus]1.0 or -1.0 when most of the observations are selected into the sample and the outcomes are unequally distributed. Outcomes of 0 can induce an estimated correlation of -1.0, and outcomes of 1 can induce an estimated correlation of [plus]1.0. This paper analyzes the population problem, derives corresponding sample conditions, …
Tests of the Specification of Univariate and Bivariate Ordered Probit
This note presents tests of the specification of univariate and bivariate ordered probit. The test is sensitive to deviations from either normality or the exogeneity of the explanatory variables. As an example, the ownership of dogs and televisions, both sources of time-intensive entertainment, is studied. The specification for dogs is not rejected, the specification for televisions is rejected at the 2.0% level, and the specification of both tog…
Labour supply and wages among nuclear and extended households: The Surinamese experiment
This article explores labour market behaviour of members of extended and nuclear households in Suriname. Previous analyses have found that co‐operative childcare opportunities within the extended household increase female labour force participation. Such coordination implies correlated participation decisions, which invalidates standard assumptions made in estimating participation with probits and wages with regressions. We employ a GMM estimatio…
Timeliness in the Adoptive Placement of Photolisted Children: The New York State Blue Books
This study uses information from the New York State (NYS) Adoption Photolisting Service, the Blue Books, to determine the characteristics of the hardest-to-place children, factors related to timeliness in the adoptive placement of listed children, and the efficacy of photolisting updates in impacting placement probabilities. The data for this study consist of computerized records on all children photolisted in NYS from 1976 to 1997. Results indic…
Taxing Losses: Economic Suicide or Shrewd Trade Policy
The ancient Nabateans had an economic law that penalized those who diminished and rewarded those who increased the common property. Normally, such a law could reduce long-run growth, but the Nabateans flourished. In the context of their nearly pure trade economy, this law enhanced the city of Petra's ability to accumulate wealth by discouraging competitive price reductions (a strategic trade policy). Under general assumptions, the policy would al…
Time dependence and unmeasured heterogeneity in administrative data analysis: Application to adoption photolisting services data
Levels and Long-Term Trends in Earnings Inequality: Overcoming Current Population Survey Censoring Problems Using the GB2 Distribution
Over its history, the March Current Population Survey (CPS) has increasingly captured the upper tail of the distribution of all sources of income. This, together with time-consistency problems in top coding, means that users of both the public-use and restricted-access CPS will understate the level of wage earnings and income inequality in earlier years and overstate their growth over time. We address this problem by modeling the personal earning…
AdoptUsKids national photolisting service: Characteristics of listed children and length of time to placement
Choice in a World of New School Types
As school choice options have evolved over recent years, it is important to understand what family and school factors are associated with the enrollment decisions families make. Use of restricted‐access data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study allowed us to identify household location from a nationally representative sample of students and to match households to the actual schools attended and other nearby schools. This matching is signif…
Public Employee Quality in a Geographic Context: A Study of Rural Teachers
Recruiting high quality employees is one of the key functions of public human resource managers and a critical component of effective public service delivery. This is particularly true in education but little is known about public sector or teacher hiring patterns in areas that are predominantly rural, poor, and isolated from other locales. This article begins to fill that gap. We find that rural educational agencies employ the new teachers of lo…
Why Do Women Enter and Exit From Material Hardship
Current critiques of the official federal poverty measure have led to a growing interest in alternative measures of well-being, such as individual reports of the inability to meet basic needs. This article considers a wide set of risk factors for four different forms of material hardship (food insufficiency, utility disconnection, unmet medical needs, and housing problems) using data from a panel study of single mothers. Specifically, the authors…
The Spreading of Innovation: State Adoptions of Energy and Climate Change Policy
The American states are engaged in a variety of policy efforts to mitigate climate change and alter energy usage. While a number of studies have considered the reasons for adoption of renewable energy and climate change policies, they typically consider only one policy in isolation. This study examines policy adoption of 14 energy and climate change programs in a pooled event history analysis. Our primary research questions consider average effec…
The Determinants of Municipal Structures on a Political-Administrative Dimension
Adjusting municipal structures and cross-adoption of structural characteristics between mayor-council and council-manager municipalities have been common in the United States in recent decades. This research investigates seven essential structural characteristics of U.S. municipalities and constructs a municipal structure political-administrative index. We attempt to examine the determinants of municipal structures on a political-administrative d…
Dividing the Pie: Parties, Institutional Limits, and State Budget Trade-Offs
Although many studies on budgetary outcomes of state politics focus on budget sizes, budget trade-off studies focus on budget composition. This study examines the role of state politics in explaining budget trade-offs. We apply Peterson's typology to analyze budget trade-offs among developmental, allocational, redistributive, and educational expenditures. We focus on the roles of partisan and ideological factors and their interactive effects with…
State Fiscal Constraints and Local Responses: Evidence from the Property Tax Limit Overrides in Massachusetts
This research examines the determinants of the likelihood of property tax limit override attempts and successes in the context of Massachusetts's Proposition 21⁄2. The authors apply the “Leviathan” government theory, median voter theory, and agenda‐setting theory to develop theoretical expectations and use data from Massachusetts municipalities for 1991–2013 as a sample for empirical tests. Override attempts are not randomly proposed; therefore, …
Lobbying, learning and policy reinvention: An examination of the American States’ drunk driving laws
Scholars have consistently shown that learning of successful policies in other states leads to higher likelihood of policy adoption. This study extends this finding two ways. First, policy learning can also lead to more comprehensive adoption of successful policies. Second, the effect of policy learning on policy comprehensiveness is conditional on lobbying by interest groups, an alternative source of information about policy success. To test the…
The effects of high-quality financial reporting on municipal bond ratings: Evidence from US local governments
While credit rating agencies mention that a government factor is one criterion for assessing municipal bond ratings, current studies on credit ratings offer relatively little evidence as to how the government factor affects municipal bond ratings, compared to socioeconomic and financial factors. By utilising the award of the Certificate of Achievement for Excellence in Financial Reporting Programme of the Government Finance Officers Association a…
Understanding Public Participation as a Mechanism Affecting Government Fiscal Outcomes: Theory and Evidence From Participatory Budgeting
This study aims to advance our knowledge about the role of public participation in formulating budgetary decisions of local governments. By focusing on participatory budgeting as a prominent form of public participation in the budgetary process, we posit that participatory budgeting serves two important roles in aligning the fiscal outcomes of local governments with citizen preferences: (1) increased transparency of the local budget and (2) impro…
A novel research method to detect punctuation and its application to bureaucratic decision‐making
Punctuated equilibrium theory (PET) suggests that policy processes experience periods of stability interrupted by dramatic change. Most previous studies have used kurtosis, distribution tests, or change categorization to assess punctuation, but these methods provide limited information. We propose a novel approach that statistically determines the cutoff between small and large changes, assuming small changes follow a normal distribution and larg…
Economics (20 works) · Political science (12 works) · Econometrics (10 works) · Statistics (8 works) · Computer Science (7 works) · Mathematics (7 works) · Psychology (7 works) · Business (6 works) · Demographic economics (6 works) · Law (6 works)