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-sizedadministrations in Germany (districts) on...

In many federal countries, local governments run large deficits, even when fiscal supervision by state authorities is tight. I investigate to which extent party alignment of governments and fiscal supervisors influences budget deficits. The dataset includes 427 German local governments for the...

While many central governments amalgamate municipalities, mergers of larger county administrations are rare and hardly explored. In this paper, we assess both fiscal and political effects of county mergers in two different institutional settings: counties act autonomously as upperlevel local...

Party performance in state and federal elections is highly interdependent. Federal elections impact regional voting dynamics and vice versa (electoral externalities). We quantify the extent of simultaneous electoral externalities between two layers of government. We apply vector autoregressions...

I present the first database of historical local population figures for all Germany. The German Local Population Database (GPOP) includes total population in 1871, 1910, 1939, 1946, 1961, 1987, 1996, 2011, and 2019 for the universe of all German municipalities, counties, and states at consistent...

Do citizens legislate different tax policies than parliaments? We provide quasi-experimental evidence for causal effects of direct democracy. Town meetings (popular assemblies) replace local councils in small German municipalities below a specific population threshold. Difference-in-differences,...

How do staying minorities that evade ethnic cleansing integrate into re-settled communities? After World War Two, three million ethnic Germans were expelled from Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland, but some were allowed to stay, many of them left-leaning anti-fascists. We study quasi-experimental...

How do staying minorities that evade ethnic cleansing integrate into re-settled communities? After World War Two, three million ethnic Germans were expelled from Czechoslovakia's Sudetenland, but some were allowed to stay, many of them left-leaning anti-fascists. We study quasi-experimental...

Nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg wurden mehr als 3 Mill. Sudetendeutsche aus der Tschechoslowakei vertrieben. Rund 100000 unverzichtbare Industriebeschäfigte sowie 100 000 sudetendeutsche Antifaschisten blieben jedoch. Ihr Schicksal war bisher weitgehend unbeleuchtet. Wir zeigen, dass in Regionen mit...