Key points are not available for this paper at this time.
The relative efficiency of the city manager versus the elected mayor-council form of municipal government has been the subject of several studies in the urban public sector literature. Booms 5 hypothesized that professional city managers are more likely than elected mayors to minimize the cost of producing municipal services. He found that city spending levels were significantly lower in city manager (hereafter CM) cities compared to elected mayorcouncil cities (hereafter EMC). Later studies 1; 15; 16; 18; 23 investigated the effect of government form on municipal wage levels. Because city managers have considerable autonomy in personnel matters, it was felt that they could act specifically to hold down labor costs. It was also claimed that city managers are more effective in bargaining with employee organizations, which enables them to hold negotiated wage (and fringe benefit) increases below those of comparable EMC cities. Despite the fact that several studies have examined the impact of government structure, empirical results have not overwhelmingly supported the hypothesized superiority of CM cities. While Anderson 1, for example, found that annual wage increases tend to be smaller in professionally managed cities, other wage studies have found either no difference in wage levels 16; 18; 23 or that wages are higher, rather than lower, in CM cities 16. Edwards and Edwards 15 found that the general impact of unionism on sanitation workers' wages is smaller in CM cities, but that in non-union cities wages tend to be higher under a CM form of government. Booms's original research is still the only study in the urban public finance literature to investigate the efficiency of CM cities as measured by spending level differences.'
Deno et al. (Thu,) studied this question.