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...

A standard finding in the literature on political agency is that voters punish incumbents who raise taxes. Typically, only the reaction of a representative voter is considered, with the notion that all voters dislike high taxes because the revenue is, at least on the margin, spent on...

This paper adds to knowledge on the role of politicians' and voters' identities in influencing policy-making in societies marked by ethnic inequality. The outcome we investigate is the initiatives and policies targeting Indigenous populations in the context of Australia. We ask whether and how...

This paper proposes and empirically tests a new demand-side explanation for distortions in public spending composition. Voters prefer spending with certain and immediate benefits when they have low trust in electoral promises and high discount rates. The paper incorporates these characteristics...

Inter-municipal cooperation (IMC) is promoted as a way in which small, fiscally weak munic-ipalities can cope with intensified interregional competition and demographic change. We pro-vide first evidence on citizens' support for IMC using survey data from rural Germany. We cover different fields...

This paper examines the effect of local political decision-making institutions (i.e., direct democracy vs. representative democracy) on citizens' preferences toward public spending. Exogenous variation in institutions comes from a regression discontinuity design, which exploits a discrete change...

This study identifies the factors influencing household choice of coping strategy to an extreme flood event in Marikina City in the national capital region of the Philippines, as well as household recovery after the event, measured in terms of the length of time repair, rebuild, or replace...