In the twentieth century there was a significant trend towards larger local governments through amalgamations in the western world. Amalgamations provide potential economic benefits but might also give rise to costs driven by opportunistic political behavior. This study uses a compulsory...

Whereas employee participation is generally conceived to facilitate implementation of organizational change, only limited research has investigated whether it may reduce the negative effects of downsizing. The present study compares two Swedish hospitals that implemented downsizing in different...

An increasing use of IT facilitates firms to use more efficient organizational forms. Significant reorganizations of business processes around IT capital can thereby boost productivity growth. The aim of this study is to empirically examine how firm productivity growth is affected by...

This paper extends Meenagh and Minford (2021) to the four waves of infection in the UK by end-2021, using the unique newly available sample-based estimates of infections created by the ONS. These allow us to estimate the e§ects on the Covid hospitalisation and fatality rates of vaccination and...

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...

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 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...

In their role as agenda setters and implementers of political decisions, bureaucrats potentially have the power to influence decisions in their own favor. It is however difficult to empirically test whether bureaucrats actually are involved in such actions. In this paper we suggest and apply a...

In their role as agenda setters and implementers of political decisions, bureaucrats potentially have the power to influence decisions in their own favor. It is however difficult to empirically test whether bureaucrats actually are involved in such actions. In this paper we suggest and apply a...

The effectiveness of public funds in increasing public employment has long been a question on public and labor economists' minds. In most federal countries local governments employ large fractions of the working population, meaning that a tool for stimulating local public employment can...