Community-driven development is an approach to development that emphasizes community control over planning decisions and investment resources. Over the past decade, it has become a key operational strategy for many national governments, as well as for international aid agencies, with the World...

Community-driven development is an approach to development that emphasizes community control over planning decisions and investment resources. Over the past decade, it has become a key operational strategy for many national governments, as well as for international aid agencies, with the World...

This paper documents the existence of a “Formality Effect” in government communications. Across three online studies and three field experiments in different policy contexts (total N = 67,632), we show that, contrary to scholar and practitioner predictions, formal government communications...

States merge small and medium sized municipalities to achieve economies of scale. Little is known to which extent mergers of large local governments reduce expenditures. I use the synthetic control method to identify the effect of mergers of county-sized administrations in Germany (districts) on...