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...

This paper investigates the effect of political representation on the electoral outcome at the party level in a proportional multiparty election system using data from Swedish local government elections. There are two notions of representation in a council; the first is to hold seats, and the...

This paper first formulates a model of how the politicians in a local government collectively lobby to raise intergovernmental grants to their local government. The model identifies a relationship between council size and grants received. I then study this relationship empirically using the...

Recent Monte Carlo evidence has shown that tests based on asymptotic critical values tend to reject a true null too often, while tests based on bootstrap critical values have empirical sizes that are very close to the nominal ones. This casts doubt on the growing number of studies indicating...

The structural differences and the dynamics in prices on the second-hand market for family houses in large (Stockholm, Gothenburg and Malmo), medium-sized, small and industrial cities and sparsely populated areas are analysed in this paper. The basic house price data set used in the analysis...