PresentationScript.Rmd

---
title: 'Script: Presentation'
author: "Jonas Markgraf"
date: "28 April 2016"
output: word_document
---
# Slide 1: Title Slide

- Small research project: analyzed publicly owned banks and their effect on electoral outcomes in German subnational politics
- Content: 
1. Motivation and background information
2. Outlining hypotheses and storyline
3. Malte: Presenting empirical strategy, data, and findings

# Slide 2: Motivation
- financial crisis of 2007!!
    - brought banks to the center of public attention
    - academic interest in the role of politics in regulating and taming bank behavior increased
-	interaction between politics and banks widely studied already
    - however: role of public banks and politicians' influence is largely neglected: surprising given the central importance of publicly owned banks in some European banking systems, esp. Germany
    
=> there is no nuanced understanding of effect of politicians on boards of publicly owned banks for banks’ activities and for electoral outcomes

# Slide 3: Institutional Background
- more than 400 Sparkassen in Germany
- Sparkassen are important providers of 
    - credit to SMEs and local governments, i.e. central players in Germany's Mittelstands economy
    - & local public goods such as access to finance through branch system or donations to local initiatives and sports teams
- Sparkassen have strong regional outlook and are deeply entrenched in German local politics
    - business areas are regionally constrained
    - publicly owned by counties and/or municipalities
    - local mayors have sometimes seat at local Sparkasse, but not all mayors in Germany have seat at Sparkassen board --> fact that we exploit for our research design
    
# Slide 4: Map
- as an illustration how municipality borders and Sparkassen business areas match and how Sparkassen operate.
    
# Slide 5: Hypothesis
- based on rational choice assumptions that actors are rational utility maximizers, we hypothesize that mayors with a Sparkassen board seat extract political rents from this position, hence, increase their re-election chance
- thus, our hypothesis is that mayors with a board seat at a Sparkasse are more likely to get re-elected than mayors without a board seat

# Slide 6: Storyline
- in what way can a board seat help a mayor to get re-elected? Two different mechanisms:
    - direct channel: mayors can influence strategic decisions of banks
        - influence credit volume, e.g. increase before election
        - postpone unpopular steps such as consolidation or mergers until after election
        - direct donations to projects with high visibility or force bank to payout profits to owners, i.e. municipalities
        
    - indirect channel: voters prefer qualified mayors over unqualified mayors , and board membership might be interpreted as a strong signal of financial competence of the mayor
-