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This article provides a snapshot of several innovative and underused methodological approaches employed by scholars from across public management.

A comparative review of methodological approaches to public management research is used.

The authors find evidence of scholars applying numerous novel methodological approaches to study social science phenomena, including agent-based modeling, nonparametic approaches, social network analysis, Granger equations and techniques for correcting selection bias.

The review does not cover all of the innovative methodological approaches used in social science. However, the methodological techniques showcased offer promise for advancing public management research, whether used as primary applications or as one of multiple methods (triangulation) to test the validity of research findings and/or to more comprehensively understand the phenomena being studied.

The techniques reviewed include example applications to aid researchers who may wish to apply them in their own research. The novel tools and methods already in use by public management researchers contradict the perception that public management methods have lagged behind other social science disciplines.

Public management researchers have successfully leveraged theory to advance the understanding of contracts and the different governance structures that underpin contract relationships. Yet there is still much to learn about the implications for different governance structures. Applying insights from property rights, the purpose of this paper is to examine the substance of initial government contracts and their subsequent amendments in order to determine whether allocation of decision rights leads to better or worse contract amendments.

The authors evaluate the text of initial contracts and their subsequent amendments in 258 government–business relationships and focus on the implications of assigning key decision rights to the party with most relevant knowledge expertise.

Two primary findings are presented. First, initial contracts where knowledge expertise and the associated decision rights are co-located (i.e. integrated) are likely to be associated with ex post adjustments that benefit both parties to the contract. Second, the authors find that this initial finding is likely a result of government integration as opposed to supplier integration.

Given that we know most professional service contracts require some form of contract amendment over time, this research helps us understand why some amendments will reinforce the collaborative (Pareto enhancing) nature of the relationship, while others may be more one sided (rent seeking). Unlike other theoretical approaches (e.g. transaction cost theory), property rights theory provides guidance for such decision making.

By using the analysis of 30 years of publications in the journal International Journal of Public Sector Management, the purpose of this paper is to discover trends in publications, such as single vs joint authorship, topics and country of origin in authorship and readership.

Using secondary sources, such as Scopus and the Manuscript Central system, quantitative data are collected and then analysed with simple descriptive statistics.

Single authorship has gone down, while the number of articles has gone up. The authors still mainly come from English-speaking countries, as do the readers who cite the articles. The majority of publications still reports findings from qualitative, empirical research but on an increasing number of varying topics.

The findings give insight into the publication patterns in public management, indicating developments in the academic practices of the discipline.

The purpose of this study was to measure the bias on a binary option's effect estimate that appeared in the types of questions asked and in the placement changes of public service users.

The author designed Monte Carlo simulations with the analytical strategy of latent trait theory leveraging a probability of care-placement change. The author used difference-in-difference (DID) method to estimate the effects of care settings.

The author explained the extent of discrepancy between the estimates and the true values of care service effects in changes across time. The time trend of in-home care for the combined effect of in-home care, general maturity, and other environmental factors was estimated in a biased manner, while the bias for the estimate of the incremental effect for foster care could be negligible.

This study was designed based on individual child-unit only. Therefore, higher-level units, such as care setting or cluster, county, and state, should be considered for the simulation model.

This study contributed to illuminating an overlooked facet in causal inferences that embrace disproportionate selection biases that appear in categorical data scales in public management research.

To model the nuance of a disproportionate self-selection problem, the author constructed a scenario surrounding a caseworker's judgment of care placement in the child welfare system and investigated potential bias of the caseworker's discretion. The unfolding model has not been widely used in public management research, but it can be usefully leveraged for the estimation of a decision probability.