Dynamic Commitment and the Soft Budget Constraint: An Empirical Test
基于动态承诺问题构建了软预算约束的实证框架，利用瑞典地方政府数据发现，从硬预算约束转向软预算约束平均导致地方政府债务增加超过20%。
This paper develops an empirical framework for the problem of soft budgets which is explicitly based on a dynamic commitment problem, i.e., the inability of a supporting organization to commit itself not to extend more resources ex post to a budget-constrained organization than it was prepared to provide ex ante. Swedish local governments are used as a testing ground since the central government distributed a large number of fiscal transfers. The estimated soft-budget effect is economically significant: on average, a local government increases its debt by more than 20 percent by going from a hard to a soft budget constraint.