Intergovernmental Grants and Bureaucratic Power

Matz Dahlberg (), Heléne Lundqvist () and Eva Mörk ()
Additional contact information
Matz Dahlberg: Department of Economics, Postal: Uppsala University, P.O. Box 513, SE-751 20 Uppsala, Sweden
Heléne Lundqvist: Department of Economics, Postal: Uppsala University, P.O. Box 513, SE-751 20 Uppsala, Sweden

No 2008:12, Working Paper Series from Uppsala University, Department of Economics

Abstract: In their role as agenda setters and implementers of political decisions, bureaucrats potentially have the power to influence decisions in their own favor. It is however difficult to empirically test whether bureaucrats actually are involved in such actions. In this paper we suggest and apply a new way of testing the hypothesis that bureaucrats can and do in fact affect policy to their own benefit. Making use of a discontinuity in the Swedish grant system, we estimate causal effects of intergovernmental grants on different types of personnel employed by the local governments. On the margin, we find a large, positive effect of grants on the number of bureaucrats in the central administration, but no effects on the number of personnel in other important sectors run by the local government (child care, schools and elderly care). These results support the view that bureaucrats are able to, and do indeed, affect the allocation of grants within municipalities to support own goals.

Keywords: Fiscal federalism; grants; bureaucrats; rent seeking; discontinuity analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C33 H11 H70 H83 J45 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-pbe and nep-ure
Date: 2008-10-20
View list of references

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nek.uu.se/Pdf/wp2008_12.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Intergovernmental grants and bureaucratic power (2008)
Working Paper: Intergovernmental Grants and Bureaucratic Power (2008)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hhs:uunewp:2008_012

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Paper Series from Uppsala University, Department of Economics
Address: Department of Economics, Uppsala University, P. O. Box 513, SE-751 20 Uppsala, Sweden
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by Katarina Grönvall ().