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The political budget cycle of child and youth welfare expenditures


Nikolka, Till (2025):
The political budget cycle of child and youth welfare expenditures.
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In public finance, political budget cycles have been studied with respect to different policy fields and institutional contexts. The goal of this paper is to test for election cycle effects in child and youth welfare expenditures at the level of counties and mu-nicipalities in Germany. Exploiting the timing of local elections in different federal states and controlling for time and regional fixed effects as well as time varying region-al characteristics the empirical analysis reveals increasing public spending on childcare institutions and youth work prior to elections. The effect for childcare institutions is driven by rural counties and counties with high financial power. The effect for youth work is only observed in larger cities and in states with a lower minimum voting age. Institutional heterogeneities can help to explain these findings.