Political Mergers as Coalition Formation

Eric Weese

Working Papers from Economic Growth Center, Yale University

Abstract: Political coalition formation games can describe the formation and dissolution of nations, as well as the creation of coalition governments, the establishment of political parties, and other similar phenomena. These games have been studied from a theoretical perspective, but the resulting models have not been used extensively in empirical work. This paper presents a method of estimating political coalition formation models with many-player coalitions, and then illustrates this method by estimating structural coefficients that describe the behaviour of municipalities during a recent set of municipal mergers in Japan. The method enables counterfactual analysis, which in the Japanese case shows that the national government could increase welfare via a counter-intuitive policy involving transfers to richer municipalities conditional on their participation in a merger.

Keywords: computational techniques; coalitions; municipalities (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C63 D71 H77 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 45 pages
Date: 2011-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm and nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (17)

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Related works:
Working Paper: Political Mergers as Coalition Formation (2011)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:egc:wpaper:997

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