This study investigates the influence of politically fragmented municipal councils on the investment behaviour of municipally owned public enterprises. We argue that common public choice theories can also be applied to public enterprises. For our observation period (2002–2014), we use a data set encompassing 8,685 municipally owned enterprises subject to commercial accounting located in 3,237 municipalities drawn from all 13 German federal area states. On average, our results point to a negative effect of fragmentation on investment per capita, supporting a war of attrition or veto player approach. Effects are heterogeneous among different sectors, possibly due to higher visibility to voters. Thus, veto players might actively try to block prestigious and publicly perceivable investment projects to hinder their opponents. Political budget cycles additionally influence this effect for some sectors. However, testing non-linearities reveal that the common-pool hypothesis cannot be completely ruled out.

这项研究调查了政治上分散的市议会对市政公有企业投资行为的影响。我们认为公共的公共选择理论也可以应用于公共企业。在我们的观察期（2002-2014年）中，我们使用了一个数据集，该数据集包含来自8个德国联邦州的3237个直辖市的8685个直属商业会计的国有企业。平均而言，我们的结果表明分散化对人均投资有负面影响，支持了消耗战或否决权方式。不同部门之间的影响是不同的，可能是由于选民的知名度更高。因此，否决权参与者可能会积极地试图阻止享有声望且可公开察觉的投资项目，以阻止其对手。政治预算周期还会影响某些部门的这种影响。但是，对非线性的检验表明，不能完全排除公共池假说。