My first research interest was centered on the evaluation of public policies and on the use of different methods to analyze the effects of public interventions in various policy areas.

I also dedicated some years to the study of public administration, mostly in Spain but with a open perspective of developments in other European countries including the EU Commission. This initial interest evolved into the study of successful cases of innovation and has been more connected to teaching than the other streams of my research.

In the last ten years I have worked on public service motivation (PSM) and on the performance of public services. Concerning PSM, I have worked on job selection and the role of PSM, on the measurement of PSM and on the relation between PSM and unethical behavior. My recent research on public services performance connects with my initial interest on public policy evaluation and it has produced various studies on the relation between objective and subjective measures of performance and on factors that influence the relations among citizens’ expectations, perceived performance and satisfaction with public services. One recent research stream has chosen public primary health services as the object of analysis. I have worker on the comparative analysis of the performance of primary health centers and on the impact of management autonomy on their results and on the motivation of professionals.

A new line of inquiry that I am currently developing focusses on administrative burden on both citizens and professionals. I have started to work on the effects on professionals and their motivation but I would like to include the effects of administrative burden on citizen satisfaction with public services. A rather natural development of administrative burden is the analysis of the barriers that citizens experiment in their relation with public administration, particularly vulnerable population. This is something I hope to include in my research agenda in the coming years.