Community-based outcomes of interlocal cooperation in social services

Abstract

We investigate the effects of interlocal cooperation in social services. We focus on three poverty-related outcomes: Guaranteed minimum income, housing rental support, and diagnosis of children at risk. We had a rich database on municipalities in Catalonia. First, we apply a quasi-experimental strategy and then perform robustness analyses using panel models. Our most robust results indicate that cooperation has a positive and significant effect on rental assistance, but has no significant effects on guaranteed minimum income. This suggests that cooperation may be effective in improving community-based outcomes where these are determined by services which involve more complex tasks and procedures.