The effectiveness of public funds in increasing public employment has long been a question on public and labor economists’ minds. In most federal countries local governments employ large fractions of the working population, meaning that a tool for stimulating local public employment can...

The African National Congress (ANC) can look back on eighty years of struggle which resulted in the liberation of black Africans, the creation of a democratic constitution and free elections. However, the last twenty years of ANC rule has been criticized for the failure to bring higher living...

The African National Congress (ANC) can look back on eighty years of struggle which resulted in the liberation of black Africans, the creation of a democratic constitution and free elections. However, the last twenty years of ANC rule has been criticized for the failure to bring higher living...

The effectiveness of public funds in increasing public employment has long been a question on public and labor economists’ minds. In most federal countries local governments employ large fractions of the working population, meaning that a tool for stimulating local public employment can...

This paper estimates voters’ response to municipality and regional level unemployment and economic growth, in Swedish general elections from 1985 to 2002, using data on 284 municipalities and 9 regions. An increase in regional growth or a reduction in regional unemployment by one percentage...

In their role as agenda setters and implementers of political decisions, bureaucrats potentially have the power to influence decisions in their own favor. It is however difficult to empirically test whether bureaucrats actually are involved in such actions. In this paper we suggest and apply a...

Do governments increase public employment in election years? This paper investigates this question by using data from Sweden and Finland, two coun¬tries that are similar in many respects but in which local elections are held at different points in time. We can thereby separate an election...

This paper studies a very pure form of “vote purchasing”. We consider whether it may be in the interest of a party to discriminate between groups that, possibly except for size, are identical in all welfare relevant spects, i.e. the groups are assumed to have the same income, needs, etc. To...

We use the 1952 Swedish municipal amalgamation reform to study free-riding and the common pool problem in politics. We expect municipalities that were affected by the reform to increase their debt in anticipation of a merger, and this effect to be larger if they were merged with many other...