The Effect of Left-Wing Party Control on Economic Outcomes
(2020) NEKN01 20201Department of Economics
- Abstract
- A common belief is that left-wing parties tend to use their influence to expand the public sector by increasing taxes – but is this belief supported by data? This study aims to find the causal effect of having left-wing majority and left-wing rule on a set of economic and policy outcomes by using panel data of Swedish local governments between 1995 and 2018. A regression discontinuity design is applied to exploit the discontinuous party control change at 50 percent of the vote share making left-wing majority as good as randomly assigned to observations close to the threshold. The findings suggest that left-wing party control has a negative effect on income inequality and intergovernmental grants and a positive effect on employment and... (More)
- A common belief is that left-wing parties tend to use their influence to expand the public sector by increasing taxes – but is this belief supported by data? This study aims to find the causal effect of having left-wing majority and left-wing rule on a set of economic and policy outcomes by using panel data of Swedish local governments between 1995 and 2018. A regression discontinuity design is applied to exploit the discontinuous party control change at 50 percent of the vote share making left-wing majority as good as randomly assigned to observations close to the threshold. The findings suggest that left-wing party control has a negative effect on income inequality and intergovernmental grants and a positive effect on employment and income tax rate where one part of the employment increase stems from public sector expansion. (Less)
Please use this url to cite or link to this publication:
http://lup.lub.lu.se/student-papers/record/9025081
- author
- Sandberg, David LU
- supervisor
-
- Andreas Bergh LU
- Therese Nilsson LU
- organization
- course
- NEKN01 20201
- year
- 2020
- type
- H1 - Master's Degree (One Year)
- subject
- keywords
- economic outcomes, fiscal policies, local governments, regression discontinuity design
- language
- English
- id
- 9025081
- date added to LUP
- 2020-08-29 10:37:10
- date last changed
- 2020-08-29 10:37:10
@misc{9025081, abstract = {{A common belief is that left-wing parties tend to use their influence to expand the public sector by increasing taxes – but is this belief supported by data? This study aims to find the causal effect of having left-wing majority and left-wing rule on a set of economic and policy outcomes by using panel data of Swedish local governments between 1995 and 2018. A regression discontinuity design is applied to exploit the discontinuous party control change at 50 percent of the vote share making left-wing majority as good as randomly assigned to observations close to the threshold. The findings suggest that left-wing party control has a negative effect on income inequality and intergovernmental grants and a positive effect on employment and income tax rate where one part of the employment increase stems from public sector expansion.}}, author = {{Sandberg, David}}, language = {{eng}}, note = {{Student Paper}}, title = {{The Effect of Left-Wing Party Control on Economic Outcomes}}, year = {{2020}}, }