We study the reaction of low vs. high-skilled politicians to a reform, approved in Italy in 2011, that introduces stringent individual financial and career sanctions to local administrators who are judged responsible for their municipality’s bankruptcy. To this aim, we leverage exogenous...

This paper investigates the impact of the moderate growth of government borrowing on debt sustainability in 11 Russian regions over about 10 years, starting in 2010. The current study aims to assess the debt sustainability of the Russian region's budget by determining Euclidean distance budget...

When faced with budget-constrained bidders, all-pay auctions revenue-dominate standard auctions (Örst and second-price), which, in a competitive market, gives an edge to the all-pay format. An equilibrium in which sellers compete with standard auctions fails to exist if the all-pay format is...

We propose an easy-to-use method for estimating preference parameters experimentally: choices from strictly concave budget restrictions (SCBRs). SCBRs generalize the popular method of analyzing choices from linear budget restrictions (LBRs). SCBRs promise (i) to improve the informational content...

In this paper, we explore the effects of India's federal structure on state-level fiscal responsibility. Drawing from a 1991-2018 dataset, we argue that higher levels of transfer and borrowing dependence (soft budget constraints) from the central government facilitate lower levels of fiscal...

We postulate a general salience framework where agents are biased in their perception about the impact of consumption on their (intertemporal and otherwise) budget constraints. Three applications are provided. First, we trace and illustrate the consequences of applying this salience framework to...

This paper explores the influence of the State Capital Investing and Operating Company (SCIOC) pilot reform on SOE bailout using a staggered difference-in-differences model. Based on a sample of listed SOEs during 2011-2018, we find that when the real controllers of listed SOEs enter the list of...

This paper investigates the impact of financial constraints on firms' inventory holdings, an area of significant interest given that inventories are volatile over the business cycle. I use detailed data on Swedish firms' balance sheets, income statements, and credit scores. I employ a regression...

This paper examines the sensitivity of investment to cash flow using a panel of UK firms in manufacturing with a view to shedding some light on the existence of a balance sheet channel or financial accelerator. In addition to examining the impact of cash flow in different subsamples based on...

We study the design of revenue-maximizing mechanisms for value-maximizing agents with budget constraints. Agents have return-on-spend constraints requiring a minimum amount of value per unit of payment made and budget constraints limiting their total payments. The agents' only private...

Several football stadiums were built or renovated in France for hosting the 2016 UEFA European Football Championship. This study examines to which extent the financial support by local governments for stadium construction or renovation induces soft budget constraints (SBC) for professional...

This paper describes interactions between monetary and fiscal policies that affect equilibrium price levels and interest rates by critically surveying theories about (a) optimal anticipated inflation, (b) optimal unanticipated inflation, and (c) conditions that secure a "nominal anchor'' in the...

In Health Technology Assessment (HTA), commonly used techniques apply piecewise comparisons of two or more alternatives, comparing costs and outcomes associated with each treatment. According to the definition by Robbins, who considers economics the study of ‘alternative uses’ of resources...

This paper uses Chinese data to calibrate a monetary policy model, so as to study the special impact of sectoral differences in financing and budget constraints on developing countries' monetary policy. The paper finds that real estate transactions, as a particularly effective monetary policy...

Soft budget constraint refers to the phenomenon that money losing inefficient projects keep on getting subsidies and operating. It was first phrased and analyzed by the late Hungarian economist Janos Kornai when he studied former socialist economies and by now, economists generally have agreed...

This paper proposes a simple homogeneous dynamic model of investment and corporate risk management for a financially constrained firm. Following Froot, Scharfstein, and Stein (1993), we define a corporation's risk management as the coordination of investment and financing decisions. In our...