ESSAYS ON PUBLIC EMPLOYEE BEHAVIOR

Humans are one of the most important components of organizations. Research of public management has long been considering the uniqueness of public sector employees and their importance in policy implementation and public service provision. This dissertation focuses on the human side of the organization and analyzes the various aspects of public employee behavior. The first chapter studies the implementation of discipline reforms and explores how their impacts vary by the presence of same-race teachers. Minority students are suspended at a disproportionately higher rate than others. To reduce racial suspension gaps, several California school districts banned schools from suspending students for willful defiance, which consists of relatively minor disruptive offenses. This chapter evaluates the impact of these policies on high school student discipline outcomes by using a difference-in-differences strategy that exploits the temporal variation in the enactment of these policies across school districts. The results suggest that these policies decreased willful defiance out-of-school suspension rates by around 81%, but they did not reduce the overall out-of-school suspension rates. In particular, the policies significantly increased out-of-school suspension rates among Black students. This pattern is particularly strong in schools with a small share of Black teachers. Taken together, the results suggest that the willful defiance suspension bans failed to address the implicit and explicit biases in California schools. The second and third chapters examine the patterns of employee absences. Specifically, the second chapter focuses on teacher absences. While an ineffective teacher is detrimental to students’ learning, an effective teacher who is frequently absent can similarly undermine student outcomes. Using the Monthly Current Population Survey between the 1995 and 2019 school years, this chapter documents temporal and geographical patterns in teacher absences and compares these to the absence patterns of non-teachers. Teacher absence rates have decreased by 12-19% over the past twenty years. Moreover, teachers are absent less often than observationally similar non-teachers. Policymakers should provide more support to maintain a motivated teaching workforce. The third chapter investigates employee absence gaps across the public, non-profit, and for-profit sectors using a nationally representative sample of full-time employees in the U.S. Employee absences are measured by the likelihood of being absent and the proportion of working time lost due to absence. The results suggest that public sector employees take slightly more absences than non-profit sector employees. However, both public and non-profit sector employees are more likely to be absent and miss larger proportions of working time than for-profit sector employees. Employee absences decrease after public and non-profit employees enter the for-profit sector. Non-switchers across sectors mainly drive the sector gaps in employee absence. These findings suggest both sector differences and selection contribute to the sector gaps in employee absence.