I analyze the link between partisan alignment of local politicians and the incidence of political corruption, using novel hand-collected data on local political corruption in Ghana. In line with political ambition theory, I hypothesize that local politicians aligned with the national government...

Municipal boundary reform (municipal amalgamation) has been done in many countries in recent years as the result of a push to enlarge the size and coverage of local government units, which in turn is driven mainly by the prospect of economies of scale. However, in a notable body of previous...

This paper uses survival analysis to examine the time taken to carry out municipality amalgamation in Japan in terms of both forming the amalgamation committee and completing amalgamation. The results show that municipalities that depend on local allocation tax grants as a revenue source, those...

This paper provides background information and basic descriptive statistics for a representative survey of the German population conducted on our behalf by GfK in the first quarter of 2018. The survey covers various topics, including: 1) attitudes towards asylum seekers; 2) migrating workers in...

Employing a sample of Spanish municipalities from the Madrid region for the period 2010-2019, we study the influence of a politician's sex on political budget cycles (PBCs). The Madrid region is subject to a homogenous set of budget rules, which allows consistently categorising budget...

In rural areas, small and medium-sized municipalities are challenged by demographic change and intensified competition for capital and high-skilled labor. Inter-municipal cooperation (IMC) is often regarded as a significant element of a strategy to meet these challenges. Based on a survey in...

We want to find out whether grants-in-aid help the recipient government to get re-elected. We take Poland as our testing ground and analyze the impact of EU funds spent within a municipality on mayoral elections in 2010 and 2014. We employ an instrumental variables approach to account for the...

We use a hazard model to identify the factors that drive the emergence of inter-municipal cooperation (IMC). We focus on IMC in tasks of internal administration in West-Germany be-tween 2001 and 2014 - tasks where IMC may generate economies of scale while regional spill-overs are negligible. Our...

We analyze the factors driving the emergence of inter-municipal cooperation (IMC) in tasks of internal administration in West-Germany between 2001 and 2014. In line with the Institutional Collective Action Approach, we find similarities in political ideology to foster cooperation. Cost pressure...

This paper aims at testing whether inter-municipal cooperation (IMC) in policies to promote local business development has a positive impact on local economic performance. We apply two-way fixed effects as well as marginal structural models to a panel data set covering 1,849 Polish...