We analyze whether mayors’ prior occupation in the local public administration matters for their performance. In theory, mayors’ professional background may shape their competence in bureaucratic tasks. We use the example of grant receipts for visible investment projects for which mayors must submit an extensive application to the state government. Our dataset includes 1,933 mayor elections (1993-2020) in the German state of Hesse to which we apply a sharp RD design for close mixed-background races. Mayors’ background on average has no effect on grant receipts. Yet, public administrator mayors do attract more grants than outsider mayors when they are ideologically aligned with the council, raising the motivation to apply for grants in the first place. We conclude that the competence of public administrator mayors only matters when they are motivated to use it, i.e. this is an example where incentives are necessary for the effects of political selection to materialize.

We analyze the impact of Italy's OpenCivitas data disclosure program on mayoral behavior. Utilizing the program's website, we construct a network of mayors accessing expenditure data. Results show that younger, educated mayors from larger cities in northern regions, affiliated with traditional parties, are more likely to engage. Using directed dyadic models, we find mayors tend to link with similar-aged peers managing similar-sized cities in their region. Unlike neighboring municipalities, mayors within this network compete internally rather than engage in yardstick competition. We observe this network predates the website's launch, but after data disclosure, yardstick competition intensifies for re-election-seeking mayors within the network, contrasting with unaffected neighboring municipalities.

We study the reaction of low vs. high-skilled politicians - proxied by their educational attainments - to a reform that introduces financial and career penalties in case the local administration is deemed co-responsible for the bankruptcy of the municipality. We leverage plausibly exogenous variation induced by close elections between a mayoral candidate who holds a college degree and a mayoral candidate who did not attend college. To start, we document that graduate mayors on average implement a more responsible fiscal policy and are more capable of attracting external resources to the municipality's budget. Upon the introduction of penalties, however, skilled politicians tend to declare bankruptcy with a higher probability than low-skilled politicians. The effect is concentrated in the first year of the term.

We study the provision of information by local governments that supports individual compliance with nationwide regulation, and how this provision relates to the electoral process. We study this question using information about individual mobility (compliance with the lockdown) and Facebook posts by Italian local governments during the Covid 19 pandemic. We show that in municipalities where mayors were up for re-election, local governments provided significantly more covid-related information. This information caused a significant decrease in mobility and excess mortality. However, these effects seem to arise only in the northern regions of the country, where the impact of the pandemic was more severe.