2026/02/13 by Nathan Favero, Carla Flink, Tingli Qu · 1 voice
Economics, Econometrics and Finance · Social Sciences · Business, Management and Accounting · #Fiscal Policies and Political Economy #Public Policy and Administration Research #Accounting and Organizational Management
paper · doi:10.1111/pbaf.70015
openalex publication_date 2026/02/13 · openalex created_date 2026/02/14 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/15
Abstract Researchers have long studied how organizational budgets relate to performance, but how do employees themselves experience the effects of budgetary decisions? Given widespread attention to political dysfunction in US federal budgeting, conventional wisdom holds that employees are negatively affected by budgetary uncertainty (volatility, delays, and stop‐gap measures). We test how budget size and uncertainty are associated with US federal employee attitudes using survey and archival data from 2005 to 2020. Results provide some evidence that employee job satisfaction improves with enhanced funds, but there is little to no support for the notion that budgetary uncertainty influences federal employees' job satisfaction.