Local government mergers are an important policy issue in many countries, yet empirical evidence of the effects of merging and of local government size on the production and quality of local public services is scarce. We use the spatial and temporal variation in forced mergers between cities and their surrounding local governments in Norway to provide quasi-experimental evidence of the effect on long-run student outcomes. We find that the mergers increase students’ educational attainment by about 0.1 years and income by about 4%, suggesting that mergers improve long-run student outcomes through increased school productivity.

中文翻译：

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地方政府合并对教育程度和收入的长期影响*

在许多国家，地方政府合并是一个重要的政策问题，但关于合并和地方政府规模对地方公共服务的生产和质量的影响的经验证据却很少。我们利用挪威城市与其周边地方政府之间强制合并的时空变化来提供对长期学生成绩影响的准实验证据。我们发现，合并使学生的受教育程度提高了约 0.1 年，收入提高了约 4%，这表明合并通过提高学校生产力来改善学生的长期学习成果。