The paper argues that decisions by strong mayors or council leaders can have a significant impact on their cities' economic fortunes. Good decisions include urban marketing exercises, the attraction of hallmark events and good land-use and infrastructural planning: bad decisions include engaging in political conflict with central government and engaging in illegal activity. Data from 16 European cities approximately arranged in matched national pairs to standardise for the degree of power decentralised to city government, and further standardised to take into account economic structure, suggest that good mayoral decisions have a marginally positive effect on economic growth but poor decisions have a significantly negative effect.
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W.F. Lever (2001) studied this question.
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