Welfare Loss with Municipal Amalgamations and the Willingness-to-Pay for the Municipality Name

Nils Soguel and Julie Silberstein

Local Government Studies, 2015, vol. 41, issue 6, 977-996

Abstract: Functional advantages and drawbacks are commonly mentioned to rationally justify or condemn municipality amalgamations. However, many consolidation projects are resisted by local governments or citizens on the grounds that amalgamation would dampen local identity. A municipality’s name change is probably the most visible sign of the loss of community bond experienced by citizens at amalgamation time. This article aims to put a value on this loss by measuring citizen willingness to pay for their city name. This methodological approach innovates upon the literature on municipal amalgamation and place branding by exploiting the versatility of the so-called contingent valuation method (CVM). CVM confronts respondents, in a survey setting, with a hypothetical market in which a characteristic of interest is exchanged. Here the characteristic is the possibility to retain one’s city name for an amalgamated jurisdiction. The article presents the estimates provided by a survey conducted in four Swiss cities.

Date: 2015
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/03003930.2015.1061507 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
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: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:flgsxx:v:41:y:2015:i:6:p:977-996

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/flgs20

DOI: 10.1080/03003930.2015.1061507

Access Statistics for this article

Local Government Studies is currently edited by Helen Hancock

More articles in Local Government Studies from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().