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 empirically investigates the impact of populist governments on public policies and finances. We focus on Italian local governments (i.e. municipalities) over the 2010-2019 period, when a populists, i.e. the Five Stars Movement, became the most voted party in the country. We first...

Just like any other employer, the municipalities can engage participants in active labor market programs in their activities. Does this possibility affect the output of municipal services? In order to answer this question a measure for output of locally provided schooling is created using factor...

We exploit Italian law DPR 81/2009, which determines class composition, as an instrument to identify the causal effect of grouping students of different grades into a single class (multigrading) on children cognitive achievement. This article focuses on 7-year-old students - those at the...

We study how grouping students of different grades into a single class (multigrading) affects children's cognitive achievement. To do so, we build instruments to identify the causal effect of multigrading by exploiting an Italian law that controls class size and grade composition. We focus on...

We study the allocation of investment projects by municipal governments across groups of voters using data from a fiscal stimulus program carried out in Spain between 2009 and 2011. This program provided municipalities with a large endowment to spend in public investments and required the...

We exploit Italian law DPR 81/2009, which determines class composition, as an instrument to identify the causal effect of grouping students of different grades into a single class (multigrading) on children cognitive achievement. This article focuses on 7-year-old students - those at the...

We study how multigrading, which is mixing students of different grades into a single class, affects children's cognitive achievement in primary school. We build instruments to identify the causal effect of multigrading by exploiting an Italian law that controls class size and grade composition....

This paper studies how the establishment of Nuclear Power Facilities (NPF) in the 1970s and 1980s has affected local per capita income levels in NPF-located municipalities in Japan by using the synthetic control method (SCM). Eight quantitative case studies using the SCM clarify that the effects...

In this article we propose an innovative way of delineating geographical markets based on easily accessible data. We apply this concept for the day care industry and investigate providers' location choices relative to local market characteristics to evaluate the widespread presumption that local...