Dr. Trevor Brown conducts research and teaches on public management and leadership, governance, government contracting, public private partnerships, and democracy and democratic transitions.
Brown received his doctorate in public policy and political science from the School of Public and Environmental Affairs and the Department of Political Science at Indiana University, and a Bachelor of Arts in Public Policy from Stanford University.
He currently serves as the dean of the John Glenn College of Public Affairs at The Ohio State University, where he has been a faculty member since 2001. He also serves as the executive director of the State of Ohio Leadership Institute, a training resource for state and local elected officials in Ohio. He previously held the position of Pasqual Maragall Chair Visiting Professor at the University of Barcelona’s Department of Economic Policy and a visiting assistant professor position in the School of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University. Additionally, he served as the U.S. project manager and associate project executive for the Parliamentary Development Project, a U.S. Agency for International Development-funded organization that provided technical assistance to the Ukrainian parliament from 1994-2013. He is a fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration.
Brown’s research focuses on public-private partnerships and how governments organize to deliver goods and services to citizens, and when governments elect to contract service delivery, how they manage the relationship with the vendor. The National Institute of Governmental Purchasing recognized him as the Scholar of the Year in 2013. The American Society of Public Administration’s Section on Public Administration Research awarded his co-authored book, “Complex Contracting: Government Contracting in the Wake of the U.S. Coast Guard’s Deepwater Program” (Cambridge University Press), as the Book of the Year in 2014. He has published in a variety of journals including Public Administration Review, the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, and the Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory.
He teaches undergraduate, graduate professional, doctoral and executive education courses on managing and leading public sector organizations, public sector organizational strategy, organizational theory and democratic transition.
He has also worked with local, state, federal and foreign governments, as well as public organizations, to improve organizational and managerial performance. He has conducted applied research projects for the U.S. Department of the Navy, the IBM Center for the Business of Government, the Pew Center on the States, the City of Columbus, Ohio, the Eurasia Foundation, and the U.S. Agency for International Development. His research on government contracting has been utilized by the U.S. Government Accountability Office and the U.S. Office of Management and Budget.
This report explores the grantmaking activity of an extensive sample of community foundations and local United Way affiliates, with a particular focus on the support they provide to organizations involved in community and economic development.
This study explores factors influencing the development and sustainability of data sharing in the Mid-Ohio Farmacy (MOF), a produce referral program implemented in partnership between a community-based organization and an academic medical center, The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center.
This study, helps to visualize and understand how Ohio state government agencies, civil society, nonprofits and the private sector intersect with the food system to respond to disasters in Ohio.
This study, published in the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, analyzes the longer-term effects of temporary mortgage payment subsidies on mortgage default.
This study, published in Public Management Review, assesses the influence of manager inclusiveness on unit-level relational conflict and interpersonal helping behaviour.
This research explores the nature of the accountability dilemma in collaborative programs and analyzes and illustrates them in the context of wildland fire prevention in the United States.
This paper, published in the Journal of the Economics of Aging, explores why some older adults claim Social Security benefits early and whether the level of an individual’s financial stress prior to the claiming decision is associated with a benefit claim at age 62.
This study, published in Public Management Review, examines independent and joint influences of public service motivation, job prosocial impact, and job reward equity on public employee engagement.
This study, published by Applied Economics Perspectives and Policy, assesses the impact of new mortgage borrowing on food insecurity among homeowners aged 65 and older
This study, published in Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, uses a variety of skills to develop a critical framework for mapping civil society in the digital age.
This study, published by the International Review of Administrative Sciences, provides insight about how institutional context and experiences shape citizens' perceptions about procedural fairness and trust and confidence in legal institutions.
This study, published by Public Performance and Management Review, finds that contract managers who have had more rules training tend to believe that they have less autonomy and view the behaviors of others as unethical.
This paper, published by the International Journal of Production Economics, incorporates resilience into longstanding economic production theory and identifies the key components for evaluating the cost and effectiveness of resilience.
This study, published in Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, uses data on United Ways that e-filed their 990 forms and supervised machine learning to illustrate an approach for classifying a large set of mission descriptions by roles.
This study, published by the Handbook on the Economics of Natural Disasters, summarizes key contributions and advances in the empirical estimation of disaster resilience.
There is limited evidence describing utilization of clinic-based food referral programs intended to support healthy eating for food-insecure patients. To address this gap, this study aims to describe the utilization of the Mid-Ohio Farmacy (MOF).
This paper, published in the Journal of Nonprofit Education and Leadership, introduces a novel pedagogical approach that helps students understand the theories used to teach about the nonprofit sector and how educators can connect theory to current challenges impacting nonprofit organizations.
The Wave 3 survey results tell a story of the nonprofit sector’s resilience and contribution, and how organizations rallied during the pandemic to provide new services to new populations and to create partnerships with other organizations.
This study, published by the American Review of Public Administration, empirically illustrates the connection between public value frames, design choices, and public participation in a collaborative policymaking process.
This study, published in the Journal of Public Affairs Education, argues that teaching ethics should be not only limited to specific ethics courses in higher education nor just embedded as an element in various core courses in public administration programs, but also anchored in a thoughtful K-12 curriculum.
This study, published in the Journal of Business Ethics, contributes to our understanding of how communication of ethical guidelines by managers may reduce the likelihood of employee unethical behavior.
This research note uses qualitative analysis to explore the anti-harassment practices recommended to nonprofit practitioners and compares these practices to academic research to develop a nonprofit scholarly research agenda.
This study, published in Agriculture and Human Values, uses the concept of relational fields to conduct a post-hoc analysis of nine cases, examining how social movement organizations and other actors actively create new deliberative governance spaces.
This study, published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, presents an experimental design that overcomes the counterfactual problem present in all prior published experiments by relying on an actual storm with a known outcome.
This article, published in the International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations, describes how nonprofits can use ethnography to enrich research.
This study, published by Scientometrics, analyzes reference pairs in articles to search for unexpected referencing combinations at the journal–journal level
In this study, published in Economic Development Quarterly, the authors present a statistically valid typology of high-growth firms, also known as gazelles, to determine if payroll and job growth patterns differ between groups or clusters.
Using bandit algorithms, the authors of a paper in Medical Decision Making present and test an approach for finding otherwise undetected cases of COVID-19 before they lead to a widespread outbreak.
The research, published in Environment Systems and Decisions Journal, examines resilience decision making in the context of repeated catastrophic events.
In July 2020, Columbus City leaders commissioned an independent, outside after-action review of the City’s response to protests that took place last summer. Former U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Ohio Carter Stewart and the John Glenn College of Public Affairs were named the lead investigative team.
This article, published in Nonprofit Management and Leadership, develops a framework of practices nonprofit leaders can use to maintain mission integrity
Research published in the Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory suggests powerful resource dependencies are present in the public and nonprofit sectors.
This study, published in the American Journal of Political Science, investigates how the racial and ethnic composition of California school boards affects school district administration and student achievement.
This report draws on data from the fall administration of Ohio’s annual Third-Grade English Language Arts assessment to examine how the COVID pandemic has affected student learning in the state.
This study evaluates factors, policies and practices that impact and improve student attendance. Published in the journal of Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis.
Country Fresh Stops (CFS) and Donation Station (DS) are two complementary programs that support local agriculture in Appalachia Ohio. As the first study of these programs in the peer-reviewed literature, this publication identifies factors that facilitate or hinder the implementation of local value chain models of healthy food access.
Despite the benefits of adequate fruit and vegetable (FV) intake, most individuals in the U.S. do not eat recommended amounts, with lower intake among individuals with lower socioeconomic status. Findings suggesting that greater FV access is related to higher intake underpin ongoing public health efforts to increase FV intake.
This study in the journal of Aging and Mental Health examines the extent to which credit cards, other consumer debts, and mortgage debt increase financial stress.
This article in Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly draws upon concepts of community resilience to explore the antecedents of community philanthropic organizations’ response to COVID-19.
This study, published in the Economics of Education Review, explores how teachers unions affect education production by comparing outcomes between districts allocating new tax revenue amidst collective bargaining negotiations and districts allocating tax revenue well before.
This book, by Jos C.N. Raadschelders, provides the information that all citizens should have about their connections to government, why there is a government, what it does, how it does it, and why we can no longer do without it.
This study, published in the Journal of Consumer Affairs, examines how the extraction of home equity through the federally insured Home Equity Conversion Mortgage (HECM) affects the credit outcomes of older adults.
This study examines the relationship of debt stress and reverse mortgage borrowing and compares it to stress from standard mortgages and consumer debt.
This study, published in Children and Youth Services Review, examines how neighborhood poverty is associated with children’s trajectories of growth in math and reading skills in early elementary school
This report summarizes the roles that United Ways and community foundations play in their local communities, their perceptions of the changes going on in the world around them and their perceptions of their relationships with each other.
This study reviews the spillover effect of foreclosures on nearby housing prices over space and time employing geographically weighted regression, which allows modeled relationships to vary locally within a geographic area.
This study, published by PLoS One, seeks to understand whether a catastrophic and urgent event, such as the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic, accelerates or reverses trends in international collaboration
This study, published in the Review of Public Personnel Administration, explores how public employees’ incivility experiences vary across social categories, specifically by gender and race.
This report provides early reactions of the nonprofit sector to the pandemic, including their actions and concerns, to inform policymakers, funders, media, and other decision makers about how to best support the sector during this time.
This study, published in the Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, investigates whether socioeconomic representation affects teachers' perceptions of their relationships with students.
This study, published in the Journal of Public Economics, uses close tax elections to estimate the impact of school district funding increases on operational spending and student outcomes.
The study, published by the Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior, explores factors affecting access to and use of Double Up Food Bucks, a farmers' market program that doubles Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits for use toward the purchase of fruits and vegetables.
This study, published in Public Management Review, explores several local organizational characteristics that may explain the existence of collaborative relations between international and local non-governmental organizations.
This study, published in the International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations, examines how nonprofit practitioners respond to pressures to enact business practices.
The study, published in the Natural Hazards Review, reports on a series of controlled experiments with human subjects on the decision of firms to invest in resilience to mitigate supply-chain disruptions and their willingness to pay for advisory information to improve resilience planning investments.
This study, published by the Public Administration Review, discusses the behavioral public administration movement call for greater use of theories from psychology and experimental research designs to improve the rigor of public administration research.
This study, published in Public Management Review, examined the prevalence of workplace incivility and ways to reduce uncivil behavior towards women and minority groups.
This study, published in the International Public Management Journal, examines how law enforcement managers may cultivate learning and improve performance of their workgroups by demonstrating inclusive leadership
This study, published by Politics and Governance, examines the relationship between a Food Policy Council's organizational structure, relationship to government, and membership and its policy priorities.
This study, posted in Energy and Environmental Science, describes the impact of the growing use of coal power generation in Asia on climate and water resources.
This article in Public Administration Review explores the effects of city managers' career paths on the diffusion of climate policy innovation among municipal governments in the United States.
This study, published in Engineering Geology, proposes a highly efficient Bayesian updating framework that is integrated with multivariate Kriging surrogate modeling to quantify heteroscedastic uncertainties in the entire space of uncertain system variables and capture spatial and temporal dependencies among the responses using non-separable covariance structure.
This paper, published by the Academy of Management, compares practice-oriented recommendations and academic research regarding sexual harassment in nonprofit workplaces.
This study, published in Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, explores how centralization, a fundamental structural characteristic, relates to an INGO’s effectiveness as perceived by its own leader versus by leaders of other INGOs.
This chapter, in the Handbook on Science and Public Policy, explores the application of complex systems theory to understand the rapid growth of international collaboration, particularly as it can be applied to global challenges.
This study, published in Utilities Policy, presents a case of a 50-year comprehensive energy concession agreement by The Ohio State University that generated an up-front payment exceeding a billion dollars.
This study, published in the International Review of Administrative Sciences, empirically assesses the role of ethical leadership in reducing corruption.
This brief, published by the Ohio Manufacturing Institute, examines the trade conflict sparked by the federal government’s initiation of tariffs in 2018 to protect the U.S. steel and aluminum industries.
This study, posted in the Frontiers in Environmental Science, shows how stakeholders interact and perceive the food-energy-water nexus and how those perspectives are shaped
This study, published in the International Journal of Production Economics, provides a microeconomic foundation for analyzing the comprehensive range of tactics used by firms and other organizations after catastrophic events.
This study, published in the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, explores ways to make U.S. foreign policy work better for America’s middle class, even if their economic fortunes depend largely on domestic factors and policies.
This study, published in the Journal of Hunger and Environmental Nutrition, examines nutrition educators’ experiences with, knowledge of, and beliefs about local foods, and elicits ideas on how to integrate education about and access to local food systems into their current work.
This book, written by Caroline Wagner, argues that the global network of science has ushered in a new era of collaboration that is changing the playbook for science policy.
This study, posted in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, explores the possibility of meeting the demands of increased populations and economic growth in 2050 while simultaneously advancing multiple conservation goals.
This article, published in Public Performance and Management Review, provides insight into how to facilitate performance data collection within nonprofit organizations
This study, published by the Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior, describes fruit and vegetable preferences and other factors that may influence participation in community-supported agriculture.
This study, published in the American Journal of Agricultural Economics, examines the narrative whereby opioid overdoses among white, male, less-educated, rural workers have been caused by reduced economic opportunities borne by such people.
This study, published by Personnel Review, supports the idea that examining specific leader behaviors in addition to broad meta-categories can improve leadership theory, research and training.
This study, published by the Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems Journal, used a customized input-output model to simulate potential economic impacts of programs and policies that enable Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program recipients to shift purchases from traditional food retailers to DTC venues in four states.
This study, published in the Journal of Commodity Markets, details the consignment auction design used in California, in which utilities are allocated a share of emissions permits that they must sell into the uniform-price auction.
This study, published in the Journal of Public Policy, provides a quasi-experimental analysis of the price impacts of retail electric restructuring in Ohio
This study, published in the American Journal of Political Science, examines how election timing influences voter composition in terms of partisanship, ideology, and the numerical strength of powerful interest groups.
This study, published in the Journal of Urban Economics, estimates the impact of revenue uncertainty on Ohio public school districts’ educational effectiveness.
This study, published in Public Administration Review, examines the influence of empowering leadership practices on police officers' job performance, perceptions of managerial effectiveness, and unit performance.
This study, posted in Public Administration Review, creates a framework that provides guidance on how managers can harness the upsides of complex contracting while avoiding its pitfalls.
This study, published in the Journal of Regional Science, utilizes a novel dynamic propensity score matching approach for multiple cohorts of U.S. counties between 1989 and 1999 to examine local economy resilience to rare natural disasters.
This study, posted in the International Journal of Greenhouse Gas Control, examines the storage of CO2 including capacities, regional coordination, and storage in shale.
This study, published in the Energy Journal, provides a multi-utility panel regression analysis of the effect of retail deregulation on total electric bills in Ohio.
This study, published in the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, analyzes how expansions to the federal and state Earned Income Tax Credits (EITC) affected household finances over the past two decades.
This study, published in the Journal of Economic Psychology, tests whether saving rates in a federally funded, matched, savings program for low-income families – the Individual Development Account program – can be improved through insights from behavioral economics.
This study, published in Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, estimates the effect of Ohio’s School Improvement Grant turnaround efforts on student achievement and school administration.
This study, posted in the Energy Journal, examines the relationship between electricity demand and meteorological conditions to assist with short-term electricity load forecasts and long-term projections of climate change impacts.
Thus study, published in Public Administration Review, provides a theoretical framework that links public managers' and community leaders' perspectives on their own political efficacy and sources of their efficacy, yielding four types of “designers.”
This study, published in the Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, examines whether the benefits of representation stem from individual (direct)- versus organizational (indirect)-level pathways, or both.
This study, published by the Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior, reviews empirical assessments of Summer Electronic Benefits Transfer for Children (SEBTC) and Electronic Benefits Transfer research, and presents policy considerations in the program's future expansion.
This study, published in the Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior, compares the consumption patterns and diet quality of foods and beverages obtained from various sources by food security status.
This study, published in the Journal of Marriage and Family, evaluates the degree associations between neighborhood disadvantage and outcomes persist into elementary school and whether neighborhood disadvantage interacts with household disadvantage.
This study, published in Climatic Change, investigated how subsurface and atmospheric leakage from geologic CO2 storage reservoirs could impact the deployment of Carbon Capture and Storage in the global energy system.
This study, published in Public Administration Review, investigates why various mechanisms of cooperation among local authorities are chosen using the theoretical lens of institutional collective action.
This study, published by Public Administration Review, demonstrates that locally-facing firms are associated with greater levels of civic and political engagement compared with locally owned firms that sell their products to customers elsewhere.
This study, published in Theory & Society, offers a framework for explaining these processes of regulatory marketization, like cap-and-trade and ecological offsetting.
This study, published in the British Food Journal, examines how socio-economic and institutional factors impact UK food retailers’ corporate social responsibility (CSR) strategies as revealed in corporate communications and product marketing.
This study, published by the International Review of Administrative Sciences, examines the efficacy of central attempts to influence the use of specific types of contracts, namely, cost-reimbursement versus fixed-price contracts.
This study, published in the Journal of Food Science, examined how an all-natural label impacts judgments of perceived food quality, nutritional content, and acceptance.
This study, published in the Journal of Supply Chain Management, argues that contract design is a predominant strategy to set contractual expectations among supply chain partners to manage risk
This study, published in the International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, uses a randomized controlled experimental design to examine whether biological sex or gender diversity might lead to decision-making that improves investments in resilience to calamitous events.
This study, published for the Northeast Ohio Public Energy Council, assesses the effects that deregulation of electricity generation has had on electricity prices in Ohio.
This study, published in Agribusiness: An International Journal, uses food marketing and other data to find the impact of a fair trade label on a product.
This study, published in Environmental Politics, questions whether cities’ termination of their ICLEI affiliation diminishes their implementation of sustainability actions.
This study, published in Public Administration Review, assesses public managers’ use of contract incentives in practice and advances theory development.
This study, published by Administration and Policy in Mental Health, examines worker perceptions of how public child welfare agencies' purchase of service contracts with private behavioral health organizations can both facilitate and constrain referral making and children's access to services.
This study, published in the Policy Studies Journal, examines how methods for observing policy networks have not kept up with the development of new network analytic techniques required to understand governance in complex settings.
This study, published in the American Journal of Public Health, explores contextual associations between medical care providers and personal belief exemptions from mandated school entry vaccinations.
This study, published by Agriculture and Human Values, describe current distribution systems within Ohio, identifies firms interested in scaling-up distribution and inform state-level policy efforts by identifying opportunities to better target any state-level policy and program efforts.
This study, published by Public Performance and Management Review, used transaction cost economics to produce a conceptual framework that helps explain public-sector contract decisions.
This study, posted in Environmental Science and Technology, developed a Leakage Risk Monetization Model (LRiMM) which integrates simulation of CO2 leakage from geologic CO2 storage reservoirs with an estimation of monetized leakage risk (MLR).
This book, written by Jos C.N. Raadschelders and Richard J. Stillman II provides academics and students with a rich supply of knowledge on the scope, methods, and theoretical foundations of public administration.
This study, published by Public Administration Review, examines how structural differences in governance arrangements affect citizens’ notions of who is culpable for poor service quality.
This study, published in the Journal of Rural Studies, evaluates the emergence of agrifood system policy in the U.S. and suggests future evaluative policy research and comparative analysis with other domains of food policy research.
This study, published in the Journal of Food Products Marketing, demonstrates that there is little statistical difference, and even a net gain in predictive power, when using a balanced sample to test factors that influence a firm’s decision to market organic food.
This study, published in PLOS 1, examines the effects of government spending on postdoctoral researchers’ (postdocs) productivity in biomedical sciences, the largest population of postdocs in the US.
This book, written in part by Jos Raadschelders, describes how civil service systems have been subject to intense scrutiny and their roles brought into question.
This book, written by Jos Raddschelders and Eran Vigoda-Gadot, is a comprehensive, comparative text on the structure and function of governments around the world.
This book, written in part by Jos Raadschelders, features chapters spotlighting theorists in the field, covering his/her life, research, writings, and impact, introducing the discipline′s most important scholarship in both a memorable and approachable manner.
This book, written by Jos Raadschelders, tracks the emergence of the field against a background of the expanding conception of the state and the growth of public services