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Institutional Constraints and Annexation Activity in the US in the 1970s

Department of Economics, University of North Carolina, Charlotte, NC 28223, USA

This study provides new evidence that annexation laws do matter significantly in determining the rates at which municipalities annex territory. Equally important, the type of municipal governing structure was found significant in determining the rate at which municipalities annex. Where annexations are possible, one could conclude that municipalities that operate under municipal determination annexation laws and a commission type of municipal government are most likely to succeed in expanding corporate limits to protect municipal government revenues. On the other extreme, municipalities that operate under quasi-legislative annexation laws and have mayor-council forms of local government are least able to expand corporate boundaries to protect the revenue base. The results are based on a sample of 370 municipalities from all but seven states in the US. A potential weakness of the findings stems from the nature of the reporting of annexation activity and other pertinent data by municipalities. A second weakness results from differences in annexation laws within a given category of laws. Not all laws categorised the same way have equal impacts on annexation activity due to differences in restrictions placed on cities in different states and sometimes in the same state. Another weakness to consider is that these findings are relevant to the municipalities in the sample, but not necessarily to the municipalities that chose not to report data. Further, municipalities with populations of less than 25 000 people as of 1970 were not included in the study, and their annexation experiences might be different from those reported here.

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