We study management practices and performance of public sector organizations in Germany. For a representative sample of municipalities, we provide survey evidence for substantial het-erogeneity in the use of structured management practices. This heterogeneity is not driven by differences across...

Das vorliegende Arbeitspapier gibt einen Überblick über den Stand der Diskussion um soziale oder ökologische Kriterien in der Vorstandsvergütung und untersucht, welche Erfahrungen und Einschätzungen Arbeitnehmervertreter/innen in den Aufsichtsräten mit der Einführung erweiterter Kriterien...

Das vorliegende Arbeitspapier gibt einen Überblick über den Stand der Diskussion um soziale oder ökologische Kriterien in der Vorstandsvergütung und untersucht, welche Erfahrungen und Einschätzungen Arbeitnehmervertreter/innen in den Aufsichtsräten mit der Einführung erweiterter Kriterien...

Firms may underinvest in local environmental protection even from the private viewpoint of its owners and employees, but works councils may help mitigate this problem. We show that increases in environmental investments when councils are present could be employee-led, firm-led, or jointly-led....

This paper analysis the link between political strength and public sector wages using a unique matched individual-employer data set for Norwegian local governments during the period 1990-1998. The results indicate that political strength, measured in several ways, has a positive effect on wages,...

This paper provides a simple model to explain effect of political alignment between different tiers of government on policy choices and election outcomes. We derive precise predictions that, as long as voters attribute most of the credit for providing public goods to the local government: (i)...

We study the returns to political office using data from Finnish parliamentary elections in 1970-2007 and municipal elections in 1996-2008. The discontinuity of electoral outcomes in individual candidate votes allows us to estimate the causal effect of being elected on subsequent income. Getting...

The last decade has seen the burgeoning of several hundred local community currency institutions in cities across the world. Although residents of these communities claim that local currency promotes local development, how if at all it does so has hitherto been unexplored. This paper argues that...

This paper, conducted as part of the research activities of SOSE S.p.A., develops a simple and innovative model to evaluate the performance of local government in the provision of local public services. The model employs a reduced set of information and fewer assumptions than traditional...

This paper investigates the political economy of after merger effects of the large scale municipal amalgamations in the German state of Baden-Württemberg in the early 1970s. By exploiting the huge variance in the amalgamation process in terms of number of participating municipalities,...