Does inter-municipal collaboration improve public service resilience? Evidence from local authorities in England.

Resilient organizations maintain functioning during times of unexpected adversity. Collaboration may enhance resilience by enabling scarce information, resources and capabilities to be leveraged across organizations, although it may also impede rapid and flexible decision-making. We explore this dilemma using the case of 'inter-municipal' collaboration in England, analysing how the first COVID-19 lockdown in 2020 affected the provision of Housing Benefit – a locally administered social-security entitlement. Using OLS, probit, random-effects GLS and Hausman-Taylor estimations on time-series data from 187 lower-tier councils, we find that collaboration partly limited the decline in service accuracy but gave no protection to service speed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]