 Political Representation and Effects of Municipal MergersOskari Harjunen, Tuukka Saarimaa and Janne Tukiainen No 98, Working Papers from VATT Institute for Economic Research Abstract: We study the effects of municipal mergers using novel geocoded data on public sector jobs, housing transactions and local politicians’ place of residence. We find that total municipal expenditures evolve in the same way on average in merged municipalities as in the control group of hypothetical mergers that did not take place. These findings hide substantial heterogeneity within the mergers. Those municipalities that gained only weak political representation in the new post-merger council experience a substantial reduction in local public jobs in administration, and health and social care sectors relative to the municipalities in the same merger that were more strongly represented. This result implies that the mergers had an effect on the within merger spatial distribution of municipal services. However, we do not find conclusive evidence concerning welfare effects. This might be explained by a distance-quality trade-off related to these services. Keywords: health and social services; impact assessment of policy measures; local democracy; municipal finances; municipal mergers; municipalities; public services; voting; Local public finance and provision of public services; C23; D72; H72; H75; H77 (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:fer:wpaper:98 Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from Access Statistics for this paper More papers in Working Papers from VATT Institute for Economic Research Contact information at EDIRC. |
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