Recent years have brought increasing number of publications empirically assessing
outcomes of territorial reforms. This paper provides a systematic review of 31 studies from 14 …

This paper makes use of regression discontinuity designs to estimate the effect of the
number of legislators on the size of government. The results indicate a negative effect, ie, the …

Several countries have voted reforms in order to reduce the number of national
representatives and many others have debated about that possibility. There is, however, no …

Amalgamating municipalities carries risks in terms of public expenditure control. The tax
base of the new amalgamated municipality represents a common pool resource. The …

This paper uses the Swedish municipal amalgamation reform of 1952 to study the common
pool problem in politics. The amalgams were common pools and the municipalities had …

We analyze free-riding behavior of Finnish municipalities prior to voluntary municipal
mergers. The merger process creates a temporary common pool problem, because of a …

This paper presents empirical evidence of a positive effect of council size on government
spending using a dataset of 2,056 municipalities in the German state of Bavaria over a …

We study the effect of electoral incentives on the allocation of public services across
legislative districts. We develop a model in which elections encourage legislators to cater to …

In many countries, local government size is increasingly thought to be insufficient to operate
efficiently. Two possible solutions to this problem are amalgamation and intermunicipal …

The paper examines the proposition from the law of 1 over n (Weingast et al. 1981) that
project size tends to increase with common pool size. Comparable studies have tended …