Abstract
What happens to service provision when a special district enters the public service market? Theoretically, special districts can act either as complements by supplementing existing service provision, or as substitutes by supplanting current service provision. We find a substitution effect using fixed effects regression on urban counties in the United States from 1972 to 2017. Special districts replace public service provision by county governments; however, we find no similar result for municipal governments. The results are nuanced – findings are confined mainly to spatially expansive public services like fire protection, sewerage, and solid waste management. Furthermore, we find evidence that day-to-day operations drive observed substitution and that county size is an important factor depending on the functional service area.
BibTeX Citation
@unpublished{goodman-carroll-2022,
author = {Goodman, Christopher B. and Carroll, Deborah A.},
note = {Working Paper},
title = {Are Special Districts Strategic Complements or Strategic Substitutes?},
year = {2022}}