Niskanen effects in the California Community Colleges

The regression results of this paper show that bureaucrats act to maximize both their outputs and their discretionary budgets as predicted by Niskanen for demand constrained conditions. But the evidence does not confirm the Niskanen hypothesis concerning chronic oversupply by bureaus. Further, the evidence here shows that the discretionary budgets of bureaus may not fall to zero as suggested by Niskanen. Instead, it would appear that, given severe budget constraint bureaus may not produce an excess supply of output and may cut costs in an effort to maintain a positive discretionary budget balance.