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Appointed Public Officials and Local Favoritism: Evidence from the German States

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  • Thushyanthan Baskaran
  • Mariana Lopes da Fonseca

Abstract

We study the local favoritism of appointed German state ministers. Matching hand-collected data on ministers’ place of residence to a sample of more than 8,000 west German municipalities during the period 1994–2013, we ï¬ nd that the home municipality of a state minister experiences higher employment growth than control municipalities. Given the institutional context, this effect is ostensibly due to apolitical favoritism (home bias) rather than electoral considerations. We conclude that favoritism may lead to a distortion in the allocation of public resources even in contexts with strong political institutions.

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  • Thushyanthan Baskaran & Mariana Lopes da Fonseca, 2017. "Appointed Public Officials and Local Favoritism: Evidence from the German States," Working Papers tax-mpg-rps-2017-09, Max Planck Institute for Tax Law and Public Finance.
    • Handle: RePEc:mpi:wpaper:tax-mpg-rps-2017-09
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    3. Francesco Ferlenga, 2023. "Better to be direct? Evidence from the abolition of direct elections in Italian local governments," Economics and Politics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 35(3), pages 822-891, November.
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    More about this item

    Keywords

    Distributive politics; Favoritism; Employment growth;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D73 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - Bureaucracy; Administrative Processes in Public Organizations; Corruption
    • H70 - Public Economics - - State and Local Government; Intergovernmental Relations - - - General

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