Consequences of forced migration: A survey of recent findings

We analyze whether voters value local political representation by exploiting municipal mergers, which increase the number of candidates available to voters and intensify political competition. In the Finnish open-list proportional representation system, voters rank the candidates within parties, and thus, concentrating votes to local candidates increases the extent of local representation. Using a difference-in-differences strategy, we find that the vote distributions become more concentrated in municipalities less likely to gain local representation after the mergers. Moreover, the effect is much larger in municipalities where the benefits of local representation to voters are large. The latter result disentangles voters’ responses from the responses of other political actors. The results are important also for designing local government mergers, which are an important policy tool in many countries. They highlight that concerns over deteriorating local democracy due to mergers have merit, because voters have preferences for local representation. At the same time, the vote concentration patterns we find alleviate these concerns.

/pdf/local-representation-and-strategic-voting-evidence-from-ghvw1ooytm.pdf

Local Representation and Strategic Voting: Evidence from Electoral Boundary Reforms

The extant empirical evidence on the fiscal consequences of municipal mergers is ambiguous. We therefore revisit this question by making use of a merger reform in the German federal state of Brandenburg in 2003. In addition to identifying the causal effects of mergers on municipal expenditures by relying on a natural experiment, one novel contribution of our study is to explore the fiscal consequences of both compulsory and voluntary municipal mergers within the same institutional setting. Using a difference-in-difference design with municipality-level panel data (aggregated to post-reform territorial boundaries), we find substantial and immediate reductions in total, administrative and current expenditures per capita after compulsory mergers. Voluntary mergers, on the other hand, have smaller and less robust effects.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/SSRN_ID2365979_code1296572.pdf?abstractid=2365979&mirid=5

Do Municipal Mergers Reduce Costs? Evidence from a German Federal State

https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/221747/1/GLO-DP-0583.pdf

The Impact of Forced Displacement on Host Communities: A Review of the Empirical Literature in Economics

This paper investigates whether attitudes are affected by politico-economic regimes. We exploit the efforts of state socialist regimes to promote women's economic inclusion. Using the German partit...

/pdf/politico-economic-regimes-and-attitudes-female-workers-under-bindy05d9x.pdf

Politico-Economic Regimes and Attitudes: Female Workers under State Socialism

In the immediate aftermath of World War II, millions of inner-German refugees were allowed to settle in the American occupation zone in Germany but not in the French occupation zone. Using a spatia ...

Persistence of population shocks : evidence from the occupation of West-Germany after World War II

We study political determinants of municipality amalgamations during a boundary reform in the German state of Brandenburg, which reduced the number of municipalities from 1,489 to 421. The analysis is conducted using data on the political decision makers as well as fiscal and socio-economic variables for the municipalities. We ask whether party representation in the town council influences the merger decision. To identify the effect, we follow a dual approach and make use of different stages in the reform process. First, municipalities were initially free to choose partners. In a later phase of the reform the state legislature forced municipalities to amalgamate. We can, thus, compare voluntary to forced units. Second, we simulate potential mergers from the map of municipalities and compare voluntary mergers to those simulated units. Both approaches show that political representation matters significantly during the voluntary stage of the merger reform.

/pdf/finding-your-right-or-left-partner-to-merge-mpt8pom0pr.pdf

Abel Schumann

Papers

Persistence of population shocks : evidence from the occupation of West-Germany after World War II

Finding your right (or left) partner to merge

Finding Your Right (or Left) Partner to Merge