In 2002 the Danish government reduced the size of cash transfers to new refugees. We exploit the reform to study the effect of lower transfers on educational outomces of refugee children. Surprisingly, the reduction in parental benefits has no negative effect on educational outcomes of the...

Corruption is a problem that has been shown to adversely affect a country’s development. Recent studies have shown that a country’s electoral system can affect its corruption level. But if that is the case, then electoral rules could be chosen to maximize opportunities for corruption. This...

The number of municipalities in Japan has decreased from 3,232 in 1999 to 1,820 in 2006 because of municipal mergers, called Heisei-no-Daigappei. This paper estimates the political choices of local council members in Japan’s municipal mergers. In Japan, being a local council member is a...

The number of municipalities in Japan has decreased from 3,232 in 1999 to 1,820 in 2006 because of municipal mergers, called Heisei-no-Daigappei. This paper estimates the political choices of local council members in Japan’s municipal mergers. In Japan, being a local council member is a...

In 2017, India enacted a new taxation law called the Goods and Services Tax (GST). This law created a GST Council with representatives of the Union government and the Provincial governments. The decision making procedure in the GST Council is specified to be by weighted voting. This work...

The Goods and Services Tax (GST) law (2017) of India, created a GST Council with representatives of the Union government and the Provincial governments. The decision making procedure in this Council is specified to be by weighted voting. We perform a detailed study of such a mechanism using the...

The number of municipalities in Japan has decreased from 3,232 in 1999 to 1,820 in 2006 because of municipal mergers, called Heisei-no-Daigappei. This paper estimates the political choices of local council members in Japan’s municipal mergers. In Japan, being a local council member is a...

The present work reviews how scholars of different disciplines have examined political appointments in recent years, in particular, those regarding public and semi-public organizations. First of all, I show how political economy research has shed light on several reform processes, arguing how...

In this article we test the hypothesis that secessionism reduces government quality because secessionist threats elicit a response from central governments concerned with the territorial integrity of the state and this, in turn, channels attention and resources away from necessary governance...

I study whether bailouts of local governments carry electoral benefits for state governments with a dataset covering 421 municipalities in the German state of Hesse over the period 1999-2011. I find that past bailouts have no economically significant effect on the municipality-level vote share...