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Full-Text Articles in Urban Studies and Planning
Disamenity Or A Signal Of Competence? The Empirical Political Economy Of Local Road Maintenance, Benjamin Blemings, Margaret Bock
Disamenity Or A Signal Of Competence? The Empirical Political Economy Of Local Road Maintenance, Benjamin Blemings, Margaret Bock
Economics Faculty Working Papers Series
Empirical results find different conclusions than theoretical evidence of how electorates perceive road work. This paper uses a geographically smaller unit of analysis than prior work, political alignment, local election cycles, and difference-in-differences. It finds political distortions in invasive road maintenance timing and rules out maintenance seasonality. Spatial discontinuity plots leveraging ward boundary cutoffs confirm the shift. Results identify new public distortions to road maintenance, local election cycles, which are widespread and frequent. The estimates are used to calculate financial costs of local elections on road maintenance. Local elections have cost medium-large U.S. cities over $185.5 million from 1960- 2020.
Localization Economies And Firm Productivity: Evidence From Football Teams In Sao Paulo, Brazil, Brad Humphreys, Amir B. Neto
Localization Economies And Firm Productivity: Evidence From Football Teams In Sao Paulo, Brazil, Brad Humphreys, Amir B. Neto
Economics Faculty Working Papers Series
Agglomeration economies affect urban economic outcomes. We analyze variation in sports team productivity and localization of teams across divisions and cities in Campeonato Paulista an annual football competition in São Paulo state, Brazil, exploiting plausibly exogenous variation in localization generated by a promotion and relegation system in this league. Results show that both urbanization, proxied by population, and localization affects short and long run team productivity. These results provide new evidence on the importance of localization economies in the urban economy in developing countries and shed light on why sports teams in larger cities enjoy more success than those in …