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Does Size Matter? Evidence from Municipality Break-Ups

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Listed:
  • Gissur Ó Erlingsson
  • Jonas Klarin
  • Eva Maria Mörk

Abstract

Municipal break-ups are an understudied phenomenon despite the fact that such territorial reforms regularly take place across the globe. This paper estimates how seven voluntary splits of Swedish municipalities affected municipal current costs. To predict what would have happened had the break-ups not taken place, we apply the matrix completion method with nuclear norm minimization. Our results do not support the standard view, that smaller municipalities imply higher per capita costs. Instead, we find an intriguing heterogeneity: costs increase in some municipalities, are unaffected in others and decrease elsewhere. The findings point to the complex nature of territorial reforms, the difficulty in drawing general conclusions of such, and hence, the perils of expecting them to have uniform outcomes.

Suggested Citation

  • Gissur Ó Erlingsson & Jonas Klarin & Eva Maria Mörk, 2021. "Does Size Matter? Evidence from Municipality Break-Ups," CESifo Working Paper Series 9042, CESifo.
    • Handle: RePEc:ces:ceswps:_9042
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    File URL: https://www.cesifo.org/DocDL/cesifo1_wp9042.pdf
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    More about this item

    Keywords

    territorial reforms; municipalities; matrix completion;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • H72 - Public Economics - - State and Local Government; Intergovernmental Relations - - - State and Local Budget and Expenditures
    • R12 - Urban, Rural, Regional, Real Estate, and Transportation Economics - - General Regional Economics - - - Size and Spatial Distributions of Regional Economic Activity; Interregional Trade (economic geography)
    • R50 - Urban, Rural, Regional, Real Estate, and Transportation Economics - - Regional Government Analysis - - - General

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