Performance budgeting schemes in the public sector have to operate with imperfect performance measures. We argue that these imperfections lead to wasteful fund-seeking (window dressing and lobbying) by the administrative units that produce public services. We develop a game-theoretical model to...

Performance budgeting schemes in the public sector have to operate with imperfect performance measures. We argue that these imperfections generate incentives for the potential recipients of performance-based funds to use up resources in socially wasteful influence activities. We develop a...

The paper addresses the welfare implications of conditional grants if government failure leads to inefficiencies in the production of regional public goods and services. Conditional grants may improve welfare by setting incentives for regions to improve efficiency. At the same time, resources...

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...

An increasing number of municipalities cooperates in the field of economic development. In this paper, we focus on a specific instrument in this field, namely the development of joint business parks. We apply a hazard model to data from West-German municipalities between 2000 and 2015. We find...

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...

We ask whether inter-municipal cooperation serve as a platform by which municipalities coor-dinate tax policies and reduce the intensity of tax competition. In this paper, we focus on inter-municipal cooperation in form of inter-local industrial parks. We apply the generalized syn-thetic control...