We analyze the effect of municipal employees' political representation in municipal councils on local public spending. To quantify the effect, we use within-party, as-good-as random variation in close elections in the Finnish open-list proportional election system. One more councilor employed by...

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...

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 use Finnish local election voting data to analyze whether voters value local representation and act strategically to guarantee it. To identify such preferences and behavior, we exploit municipal mergers as natural experiments, which increase the number of candidates and parties available to...

We test whether voters are rational in the sense that their decision to vote depends on its expected impact on the election outcomes. By using exogenous variation in pivotal probabilities that arise at population thresholds determining council sizes in Finnish municipal elections, we provide the...

I study the role of minimum bid increments (MBI) in internet auctions using field experiment data. I sell identical gift cards while varying the MBI. Internet auctions have typically been viewed as second-price, implying truthful bidding. However, due to the presence of the MBI, equilibrium...

In many democracies, unemployed and low-income citizens are less willing to vote. Can unconditional cash transfers weaken the link between income and turnout? We study a unique experiment in Finland, which randomly assigned a sizable group of unemployed to basic income for two years (2017-19)....

In many democracies, unemployed and low-income citizens are less willing to vote. Can unconditional cash transfers weaken the link between income and turnout? We study a unique experiment in Finland, which randomly assigned a sizable group of unemployed to basic income for two years (2017-19)....

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,...

We present the first comprehensive evidence on the role of cognitive ability and personality traits in the selection of electoral candidates and election of politicians. Using unique data that combine population registers and election statistics from local government elections in Finland with...