Understanding the Soft Budget Constraint
澄清了软预算约束的概念，将其解释为涵盖社会主义、转型和市场经济中相关现象，并分类其成因与后果，适合研究制度与承诺问题的学者参考。
We propose a clarification of the notion of a soft budget constraint, a concept widely used in the analysis of socialist, transitional, and market economies. Our interpretation is broad enough to embrace most existing approaches to soft budget constraint phenomena and provides a classification of their causes and consequences. In light of this interpretation, we then review the theoretical literature on the subject and compare it with those on other dynamic commitment problems in economics.