How are resources distributed when administrative units merge? We take advantage of recent, large-scale municipal mergers in Japan to systematically study the impact of municipal mergers within merged municipalities and, in particular, what politicians do when their districts and constituencies suddenly change. We argue that when rural and sparsely populated municipalities merge with more urban and densely populated municipalities, residents of the former are likely to see a reduced share of public spending because they lost political leverage through the merger. Our empirical analyses detect changes in public spending before and after the municipal mergers with remote sensing data, which allows for flexible units of analysis and enables us to proxy for spending within merged municipalities. Overall, our results show that politicians tend to reduce benefits allocated to areas where there are a small number of voters, while increasing the allocation to more populous areas. The micro-foundation of our argument is also corroborated by survey data. The finding suggests that, all things being equal, the quantity rather than quality of electorates matters for politicians immediately after political units change.

中文翻译：

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市政合并对当地公共支出的影响：来自遥感数据的证据

行政单位合并时资源如何分配？我们利用日本最近的大规模市政合并来系统地研究市政合并的影响之内合并的城市，特别是当他们的地区和选区突然改变时政客们会做什么。我们认为，当农村和人口稀少的城市与更多城市和人口稠密的城市合并时，前者的居民可能会看到公共支出份额减少，因为他们在合并中失去了政治影响力。我们的实证分析利用遥感数据检测市政合并前后公共支出的变化，这允许灵活的分析单位，并使我们能够代理支出之内合并的自治市。总体而言，我们的研究结果表明，政治家倾向于减少分配给选民人数较少的地区的福利，同时增加分配给人口较多地区的福利。调查数据也证实了我们论点的微观基础。这一发现表明，在所有条件相同的情况下，选民的数量而不是质量在政治单位发生变化后立即对政治家很重要。