Bulletin n. 1/2008 | ||
May 2008 | ||
Besfamille Martin, Lockwood Ben |
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Bailouts In Federations: Is A Hard Budget Constraint Always Best? | ||
in International Economic Review , Vol. 49 Issue 2 , 2008 , 577–593 | ||
This article analyses hard and soft budget constraints in a federation, where there is a moral hazard problem between the central and the regional governments. Regional governments can avoid a bailout from the center by exerting costly effort. In this setting, a hard budget constraint is not always optimal because it can provide excessive incentives for high effort, and thus discourage investment that is socially efficient. Thus, a hard budget constraint can imply the opposite kind of inefficiency that emerges under a soft budget constraint, where the common pool problem can give rise to inefficiently low effort and overinvestment. | ||