This paper studies the effect of soft-budget constraints in a pure adverse selection model of monopoly regulation. We consider a government maximizing total surplus but incurring some cost of public funds à la Laffont Tirole (1993). We propose a regulatory set-up in which firms are free to...

In this paper, we study the impact of government's budget constraint on the optimal industrial policy in industries with increasing returns to scale. We show that privatization is preferred to regulation for intermediate values of the shadow cost of public funds (i.e., the Lagrange multiplier of...