We examine how highway accessibility influences local employment outcomes. We exploit the stagewise expansion of the "Baltic Sea highway", the largest contiguous highway construction project in Germany since 1945. Results from difference-indifferences estimations and an event study approach show...

We illustrate how the two mid-sized post-socialist eastern German cities Potsdam and Rostock have managed to become climate pioneers, despite being located in regions that have been reluctant with regard to climate action. Drawing on municipal documentation and fieldwork interviews, we show how...

We use the 1952 Swedish municipal amalgamation reform to study free-riding and the common pool problem in politics. We expect municipalities that were affected by the reform to increase their debt in anticipation of a merger, and this effect to be larger if they were merged with many other...

This paper empirically investigates the impact of populist governments on public policies and finances. We focus on Italian local governments (i.e. municipalities) over the 2010-2019 period, when a populists, i.e. the Five Stars Movement, became the most voted party in the country. We first...

We examine the human development consequences of transferring responsibility for public service provision to local governments in India, using state-level variation in the timing of administrative decentralization reforms. We find that devolution of the responsibility for health functions from...

The paper deals with the effects of local governments' interference with business affairs of publicly owned utilities. A partial model is presented to illustrate the consequences of "democratic control" for the public managers' effort and the efficiency of local public production. To check the...

We investigate the effects of two accountability measures on the decisions of the local governments under decentralization. Using a panel of Philippine municipalities and cities in three election years, we find that term limits have negative but weak effects on the provision of health insurance...

This paper, conducted as part of the research activities of SOSE S.p.A., develops a simple and innovative model to evaluate the performance of local government in the provision of local public services. The model employs a reduced set of information and fewer assumptions than traditional...

Energy industries are mainly organised at national level in Hungary, however local governments have their specific role in the system. Local governments have been major performers in the first period of the transition process: they were entitled to receive 25 per cent of the shares in electric...

The drastic increase in volume of local government debt in Hungary started in 2006. My hypothesis assumes that a supposable improvement in local municipal financial management might resulted in the spread of bond issue, which in Hungary is still considered innovative. The paper is aimed at...