We analyze free-riding behavior by Finnish municipalities prior to municipal mergers. The merger process creates a temporary common pool problem, which arises because of a delay from the initial merger decision to the actual merger. Using a difference-in-differences strategy, we find large...

We analyze how (anticipated) changes in the competitiveness of the seats of municipal councilors affect their voting behavior over municipal mergers. The competitiveness of the seats changes because the merger changes the composition of political competitors and the number of available seats in...

By international comparison, Finnish pupil achievement is high and school achievement differences small. The Finnish education system is unusual also because there are no national testing programs and information on school quality measures is not publicly disclosed. Is school quality capitalized...

We use data for 198121 candidates and 1351 random election outcomes to estimate the effect of incumbency status on future electoral success. We find no evidence of incumbency advantage using data on randomized elections. In contrast, regression discontinuity design, using optimal bandwidths,...

Homeownership is heavily subsidized in many countries mainly through the tax code. The adverse effects of lenient tax treatment of owner-occupied housing on economic efficiency and growth are large and well documented in the economics literature. The main argument in favor of subsidizing...

This paper analyzes empirically the coalition formation of local governments. We introduce a novel econometric strategy involving choice based sampling from a spatial network to allow for multi-partner mergers in our empirical analysis. We apply our method to recent municipality mergers in...

This paper analyses the effects of imputed rental income from owner-occupied housing and its taxation on income distribution in Finland. Using micro-data from the 2004 Wealth Survey produced by Statistics Finland we find that owner-occupied housing has a significant impact on the well-being of...

The 1993 Finnish tax reform reduced the incentives to use debt financing in home acquisition for high-income households. Before the reform mortgage interest was deductible according to a progressive schedule creating a so-called upside-down effect, which means that the benefit from the deduction...