Sewon Kim, a Ph.D. candidate at the Paul H. O'Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs, has been awarded the prestigious Michael Curro Best Student Paper Award by the Association for Budgeting and Financial Management.
Kim’s award-winning research, “Managing Performance or Building Capacity? State Interventions in Local Financial Management,” addresses whether public organizations improve their performance more sustainably when they are incentivized to perform better through scrutiny or when their underlying systems are strengthened.
“I am honored to have received the Michael Curro Best Student Paper Award from ABFM,” Kim said. “I am especially excited to have my research recognized by the academic community I feel closest to—one that has helped me grow as a public finance scholar. I am very appreciative of the ABFM community, the Curro Award Committee, as well as all the support from professors at O'Neill.”
In her paper, Kim examined two distinct state-level interventions in local financial management: fiscal monitoring systems and training and certification mandates. Utilizing single audit disclosures alongside a stacked difference-in-differences methodology, the study isolated the long-term structural impacts of state oversight versus capacity-building initiatives.
“The results suggest that while external pressure and incentives can reveal administrative failures, they are insufficient to repair the systems that produce them, and sustainable improvement in government management requires investments in the underlying systems,” Kim said.
The Michael Curro Award is presented annually by the ABFM to recognize outstanding graduate student research in public budgeting and financial management. The award is named in honor of Michael Curro, a respected scholar and practitioner in public finance. It highlights emerging voices in the field of budgeting and financial management. Kim is the 11th recipient from Indiana University.
Kim will be honored during the annual ABFM Conference in Washington, D.C., Sept. 25.