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...

Seit Jahrzehnten werden kommunale Gebietskörperschaften fusioniert, in der Hoffnung auf Kosteneinsparungen und eine höhere Leistungsfähigkeit der Verwaltung. In diesem Beitrag geben Sebastian Blesse und Felix Rösel einen Überblick über die bestehende kausale Evidenz zu den Effekten von...

This paper examines whether revenue decentralization and direct external financial supervision affect the incidence and strength of political budget cycles, using a panel of Israeli municipalities during the period 1999-2009. We find that high dependence on central government transfers — as...

This paper exploits detailed information on local political and socioeconomic networks and a reform of local fiscal equalization in North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) to identify the role of learning in local tax rate interactions. Using this policy change in spatial lag IV regressions, we find that...

We analyze data from an author‐conducted survey of members of the French and German parliaments on European Monetary Union reform preferences. We consider three potential drivers of preferences: nationality, ideology, and personal characteristics. For European Monetary Union policies like...

Policy makers often try to optimize local law enforcement by reorganizing police forces. We study the effects of police reallocation via station closures on municipal crime by exploiting a quasi-experiment where a centrally administered reform substantially reduced the number of police stations....

German municipalities have substantial autonomy in setting taxes on two distinct tax bases: business profits and property values. We use this setting and a two-step approach to explore whether implemented tax policy is consistent with the seminal inverse-elasticity rule. First, we estimate the...

This study analyzes results from an original survey of members of the French and German parliaments (Assemblée Nationale, Sénat and Bundestag) on economic policies and institutions of the Eurozone. We find that French politicians are significantly more supportive of Eurobonds, a European...

A recent literature suggests that arbitrarily designed administrative borders are an important reason why sub-Saharan Africa remains one of the least developed regions on the globe. Accordingly, administrative border reforms may be a way to promote growth on the African continent. In this paper,...

We study the fiscal consequences of municipal mergers by making use of a largescale merger reform in the German federal state of Brandenburg. This reform, which was implemented from 2001 to 2003, led to a substantial reduction in the number of municipalities. Individual mergers were...