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This paper investigates the impact of financial liberalization on the relationship between consumption and total wealth (i.e., the sum of asset wealth and human wealth). Financial liberalization is persistent and may signal changes in expected future consumption growth rates and/or in rates of return on wealth that, through the inter-temporal budget constraint, affect the current consumption-wealth ratio. We estimate the long-run relationship between consumption, total wealth and financial liberalization by state space methods using quarterly US data. The results show that the trend in the consumption-wealth ratio is well-captured by our baseline liberalization indicator. We find that the increase in this indicator over the sample period has increased the consumption-wealth ratio with about ten to sixteen percent. Investigating the responsible channel, additional estimates show that financial liberalization has predictive power for aggregate consumption growth rather than for returns, a result that supports an incomplete markets interpretation of the link between liberalization and the consumption-wealth ratio.

In this work, the possibility of cross-border activities between two regions in the framework of the investment contract is viewed as optimal allocation problems. The problems of determining the optimal proportion of funds to be invested in liquidity and technology are analyzed in two different environments. In the first case, we consider a two-region and two-technology economy in which both regions possess the same productive technology or project, but a different stream of return. While in the second case, we examine an economy where two regions (i.e., Indonesia and Malaysia) hold different Islamic productive projects with identical returns. Allocation models are formulated in terms of investors’ expected utility maximization problem under budget constraints with respect to regional and sectoral shocks. It is revealed that optimal parameters for liquidity ratio, technological investment profile, and bank repayment are analytically characterized by the return of a more productive project and the proportion of impatient and patient investors in the region. Even though both cases employ different assumptions, they provide the same expressions of optimal parameters. The model suggests that cross-border Islamic investment activities between two regions might be realized, provided both regions hold productive projects with an identical stream of return. This paper also shows that by increasing the lower return of the project approaching the higher return, a room for inter-region investment can be created. An analytical framework of an investment contract in terms of optimal allocation model is provided.

With the goal of informing federal and state policy makers in a time of budget constraints, we used a systematic review methodology to identify and summarize findings from studies that examined the effects of losing grant aid due to policy changes and students’ failure to meet renewal requirements. Studies reviewed in this policy brief show negative effects on student outcomes when grant aid is reduced or eliminated. While results vary, this general conclusion applies when grant aid is reduced or eliminated from programs that differ in scope (federal and state), eligibility requirements (merit and need), and award amounts. This brief illuminates the importance of maintaining grant aid funding for college student enrollment, persistence, achievement, and completion. Especially in context of other pandemic-related stressors, reducing need-based grant aid will likely exacerbate declines in college enrollment, progression through college, and degree completion for vulnerable students.

The value of travel time savings (VTTS) representing the willingness to pay to reduce travel time, consists of two components: the value of liberating time [equal to the value of leisure (VoL)] and the value of time assigned to travel (VTAT), representing the travel conditions of a trip. Their relative values indicate which dimension to emphasize when investing in transport: speed or comfort. In this paper, we formulate and estimate a framework aimed at the improvement in the estimation of the VoL. By introducing a novel treatment of time assigned to domestic work, we consider that unpaid labor should be assigned a wage rate as a measure of the expenses avoided when assigning time to those chores. We use state-of-the-art data on time use and expenses as well as online data on gig workers collected in Austria, and apply the time-use and expenditure model of Jara-Diaz et al. (Transp Res Part B 42(10):946–957, 2008). The wage rates for paid and unpaid work were combined to re-formulate the budget constraint, which affected women more than men due to the higher involvement of the former in domestic activities. Compared against the original estimation, the VoL changed from €10/h for men and €6/h for women to €9/h for both genders, which in turn yields a larger average VTAT, which becomes positive for public transport. As a conclusion, the novel treatment of domestic labor contributes to closing the gap in the VoL between genders and highlights the power of unveiling the components behind the VTTS. The empirical findings imply that investments in travel time reductions rather than in comfort should be prioritized, given the very good conditions of public transport in Austria., Transportation, 49, ISSN:0049-4488, ISSN:1572-9435

This study uses a Japanese nationwide sample and experimentally compares rebate and matching, both of which are schemes intended to lower the price of monetary donation. Standard economic theory predicts that the two schemes will have the same effect on individuals’ donation behavior when their donation price is equivalent. However, we conduct an incentivized economic experiment through the Internet on 2300 Japanese residents, and find that matching, which lowers the donation price by adding a contribution from a third-party, increases individuals’ donation expenditures compared to rebate, which lowers it through a refund from a third-party. The experimental result shows that the donation expenditure in a 50% rebate treatment drops by approximately 126 Japanese yen compared to the control, while in a 1:1 matching treatment with essentially the same price of donation as the 50% rebate, the expenditure conversely rises by approximately 56 Japanese yen. This tendency is consistent with the results of previous experimental studies comparing the two schemes. We further empirically confirm that the superiority of 1:1 matching over 50% rebate is not conclusively influenced by the participants’ confusion or misunderstanding, or budget constraint lines’ difference between the two schemes. Although the Japanese government has previously enriched rebate’s content, the level of monetary donations by the Japanese people is still low on an international scale. Based on this study’s findings, we discuss the possibility that implementing matching into the society effectively encourages their donation behavior.

The real exchange rate (RER) measures relative price levels across countries, capturing deviations from purchasing power parity (PPP). RER is a key variable in international macroeconomic models as it is central to equilibrium conditions in both goods and asset markets. It is also one of the most starkly-behaved variables empirically, tightly co-moving with the nominal exchange rate and virtually uncorrelated with most other macroeconomic variables, nominal or real. This survey lays out an equilibrium framework of RER determination, focusing separately on each building block and discussing corresponding empirical evidence. We emphasize home bias and incomplete pass-through into prices with expenditure switching and goods market clearing, imperfect international risk sharing, country budget constraint and monetary policy regime. We show that RER is inherently a general-equilibrium variable, which depends on the full model structure and policy regime, and therefore partial theories like PPP are insufficient to explain it. We also discuss issues of stationarity and predictability of exchange rates. Institutional subscribers to the NBER working paper series, and residents of developing countries may download this paper without additional charge at www.nber.org.

This paper investigates how continuous-time trading renders complete a financial market in which the underlying risk process is a Brownian motion. A sufficient condition, that the instantaneous dispersion matrix of the relative dividends is non-degenerate, has been established in the literature for single-commodity, pure-exchange economies with many heterogenous agents where the securities’ dividends as well as the agents’ utilities and endowments include flows during the trading horizon which are analytic functions. In sharp contrast, the present analysis is based upon a different mathematical argument that assumes neither analyticity nor a particular underlying economic environment. The novelty of our approach lies in deriving closed-form expressions for the dispersion coefficients of the securities’ prices. To this end, we assume only that the pricing kernels and dividends satisfy standard growth and smoothness restrictions (mild enough to allow even for options). In this sense, our sufficiency conditions apply irrespectively of preferences, endowments or other structural elements (for instance, whether or not the budget constraints include only pure exchange).

This study simulates three income tax scenarios in a Mirrleesian setting for 24 EU countries using data from the 2014 Structure of Earnings Survey. In scenario 1, each country individually maximizes its own welfare (benchmark). In scenarios 2 and 3, total welfare in the EU is maximized over a common budget constraint. Unlike scenario 2, the social planner of scenario 3 differentiates taxes by country of residence. If a common tax and transfer system were implemented in the EU, countries with a relatively higher mean wage rate—particularly those in Western and some of the Northern European countries—would transfer resources to the others. Scenario 2 implies increased labor distortions for almost all countries and, hence, leads to a contraction in total output. Scenario 3 produces higher (lower) marginal taxes for high- (low-) mean countries compared to the benchmark. The change in total output depends on the income effects on labor supply. Overall, total welfare is higher for the scenarios involving a European tax and transfer system despite more than two thirds of all the agents becoming worse off relative to the benchmark. A politically more feasible integrated tax system improves the well-being of almost half of all the EU but considerably reduces the aggregate welfare benefits.

This paper studies how the rates of deduction for early retirement have to be determined in pay-as-you-go (PAYG) systems in order to keep their budget stable. The derivation of these deductions requires the use of a multiperiod intertemporal budget constraint that involves assumptions about the retirement behavior of past, present, and future cohorts. In general, it is not possible to calculate budget-neutral deductions from the budget constraint of a single individual who retires before the target retirement age—an approach that dominates the related literature. Only for specific cases one can use this second approach but then one has to adjust the discount rate to the assumption about collective retirement. If there is only one deviating individual, then the right choice is the market interest rate while for a stationary retirement distribution it is the internal rate of return of the PAYG system. In this case, the necessary deductions are lower than under the standard approach. This is also true for retirement ages that fluctuate randomly around a stationary distribution. Various long-run developments (e.g., increases in life expectancy or permanent changes in the average retirement age) might cause challenges for the sustainability of the pension system. These developments, however, can only be dealt with by adequate adjustments to the basic pension formulas and not by the use of deduction rates.

Subject. The article focuses on institutional transformations in bodies of the Federal Treasury in adopting the treasury payment mechanism and treasury service. Objectives. I analyze the performance of the public finance system in Russia during the COVID-19 crisis, and identify steps of the institutional environment emergence so as to adopt the treasury payment system and treasury service. I also evaluate whether it is possible to ensure the balance of the federal budget and regional budgets in Russia by placing temporarily available funds when introducing the treasury payment mechanism and implementing the technology of the single treasury account. Methods. The study is based on the systems and institutional approaches. I also resorted to general methods, such as the analysis, synthesis, comparison. Results. The revenue of the federal budget was found to drop considerably due to the lower business activity in Russia and worldwide and a decrease in the demand and prices for strategic power resources. The article outlines steps of the institutional environment emergence to adopt the treasury payment system and treasury service. Additional income from the placement of temporarily available federal and regional funds was found to be insufficient to ensure the balance of the above budgets. Conclusions and Relevance. Going beyond the structural conservatism of the national economy will lower the public finance sustainability risks amid rapidly changing development challenges, including the COVID-19 that outbroke worldwide in 2020. The findings can be used for practical purposes by the Federal Treasury and other parties to the treasury payment systems so as to improve its performance.

In the United States (U.S.), most reports regarding racial disparities in incidence and death from COVID-19 understate the importance of majority-Black local jurisdictions’ fiscal capacity in shapi...

Since 1991, China has implemented two significant tax reforms. The first reform, in 1994, was a large-scale adjustment of the tax distribution system between the central and local governments, and the second reform, in 2012, replaced business tax with value-added tax. Also, the size of China’s underground economy decreased from 13.55% in 1995 to 12.30% in 2016. The paper presents an evaluation of the effect of the two tax reforms and the existing underground economy on GDP growth in China. GDP is defined as explained variable, the explanatory variables include: the ratio of declared income to actual income, the change of concealed income, and the influence of tax rate change on declared income and concealed income. According to the tax reform in 1994 and 2012, two dummy variables are set respectively. In methodology, this paper uses Simultaneous equations model, SUR-OLSs and Slutsky identity. Our estimation is based on the official statistics of China National Bureau of Statistics in the period from 1991 to 2019. In empirical analysis, we decomposed tax changes into tax rate effect (change of budget constraint slope) and income effect (change of tax liability), then analyzed the impact of tax elasticity on GDP growth. The empirical results demonstrate that both the 1994 tax reform and 2012 tax reform have had a positive impact on GDP, with high statistical significance respectively. The results also confirm that the increase of tax rate leads to the increase of hidden income, which eventually leads to the decrease of GDP. The offered methodology can also be applied to most countries for time series analyses. For citation Wang Y.K., Zhang L. Underground economy and GDP growth: Evidence from China’s tax reforms. Journal of Tax Reform. 2021;7(1):87–107. DOI: 10.15826/jtr.2021.7.1.092 Article info Received December 15, 2020; Revised February 26, 2021; Accepted March 15, 2021

Crises like the COVID-19 pandemic affect firms’ innovation management and decision making. On the downside, crises lead to detriments like budget constraints, to which firms often respond by reducing their innovation activities. On the upside, crises are opportunities, where some firms exploiting changing market requirements and necessities excel. No matter in which direction, decision makers must react quickly but often rely on ad-hoc decisions or even gut feeling when drafting their crisis response strategies. Through a series of distinct cases, we demonstrate that innovation management may fill this void through patent analytics. Drawing on biochemical expertise, we particularly describe the functions and effects of COVID-19. To counter downside detriments, firms may circumvent budget constraints by discerning patents that can be (1) monetized, for example via sales or licensing deals, or (2) abandoned to achieve cost-savings, allowing firms to maintain their innovation activities. To realize upside opportunities, firms and governments may use patent analytics to detect key biotechnology firms that are likely to successfully develop treatments and vaccinations against pandemics like COVID-19. Promulgated U.S. interest in relocating foreign firms to the United States is not without technological and commercial reasoning. Herein, the insights of this study contribute to a better understanding of the use of patent information, such as smart patent indicators, harmonized patent data, novel annuity fee measures, and hand-collected datasets of COVID-19 and related antibodies’ patents to the management of innovation in times of crisis.

Kornai (2014) described the problems of municipal indebtedness in Hungary and analysed the process of bailout carried out between 2011 and 2014. In the same period, the central government also reformed the local government system, which included serious limitations of their financial independence. This study re-examines the state of the soft budget constraint (SBC) of Hungarian local governments. To start, the general theoretical framework of SBC is introduced. Then, the budget constraint on the Hungarian local governments before the bailout is described briefly, followed by an assessment of the corresponding measures which were expected to offset the negative messages of the completed bailout and to harden the budget constraint. The study concludes that the central government decided to harden the budget constraint through the introduction of new hierarchical mechanisms, while the development of fiscal discipline stopped. On the one hand, this resulted in the consolidation of municipal budgets, but on the other, it was accompanied by a serious limitation of local autonomy, projects and borrowing in general, while the central government employs specific administrative tools to show favour to some settlements according to its (political) interests.

According to the fiscal theory of the price level, in a non-Ricardian regime, high public debt should lead to a price-level increase so as to fulfill intertemporal government budget constraint. Forward-looking agents should anticipate this rise by pushing up their inflation expectations. This study tests the above hypothesis by analyzing the impact of fiscal sustainability on the formation of inflation expectations by private-sector agents – consumers and professional forecasters – in European countries. In the study, we estimate models of inflation expectations, and we include public debt among the explanatory variables. The novelty of this study lies in our analysis of whether the relationship between public debt and inflation expectations is affected by the degree to which fiscal policy is sustainable in European economies. We find that fiscal stance influences the inflation expectations of consumers and professional forecasters. Contrary to intuition, the reaction of consensus economic forecasts to public debt in countries with sustainable fiscal policies seems stronger than in economies with less disciplined fiscal policies. This may suggest that fiscal authorities are constrained by the way in which private-sector agents form their expectations, conducting more responsible fiscal policy in countries where the reaction of economic agents to fiscal variables is stronger.

In view of the fact that minimum charge and premium budget constraints are natural economic considerations in any risk-transfer between the insurance buyer and seller, this paper revisits the optimal insurance contract design problem in terms of Pareto optimality with imposing these practical constraints. Pareto optimal insurance contracts, with indemnity schedule and premium payment, are solved in the cases when the risk preferences of the buyer and seller are given by Value-at-Risk or Tail Value-at-Risk. The effect of our constraints and the relative bargaining powers of the buyer and seller on the Pareto optimal insurance contracts are highlighted. Numerical experiments are employed to further examine these effects for some given risk preferences.

We study the effect of scarcity on decision making by low income Swedes. We exploit the random assignment of welfare payments to study their borrowing decisions within the pawn and mainstream credit market. We document that higher educated borrowers borrow less frequently and choose lower loan to value ratios when their budget constraints are exogenously tighter. In contrast, low-educated borrowers do not respond to temporary elevated levels of scarcity. This lack of response translates into a significantly higher probability to default and an 11.6% increase in borrowing cost. We show that a difference in access to liquidity and/or buffer stocks cannot explain our results. Instead a framework, where the awareness of self-control problems is positively correlated with education can explain that high-educated consumers choose a lower LTV as a commitment device to increase their likelihood to repay. Analogously, low-educated with less awareness of their future self-control problems, do not tie themselves to the mast and thus ignore the consequences of their credit decisions when focusing on solving acute liquidity problems. Our findings highlight that increased levels of scarcity risk reinforcing the conditions of poverty through overborrowing.

Previous empirical evidence on municipal efficiency mostly uses cross-sectional data which makes it impossible to separate unobserved heterogeneity from inefficiency. Furthermore, they also typically use a two stages approach which has been widely criticized as the assumptions in the first stage are violated in the second stage, generating biased results. We present a longitudinal parametric study that analyzes municipal efficiency and its determinants using a one step procedure. Moreover, we analize overall e¢ ciency as well as efficiency by clusters of municipalities in order to reduce heterogeneity. We use administrative datasets of Chilean municipalities for 2008-2010 period and our results suggest that Chilean municipalities have on average an inefficiency level of 32% with a significant variance between clusters of municipalities. Also, our results suggest that socio-economic, fiscal and political variables affect municipal efficiency. In particular, we found that municipalities with tighter budget constraints are associated with more efficient municipalities.

The consumption of urban public resources—for example public schooling—is typically geographically bundled with home locations. When households differ in valuations of housing and in student abilities, the positive and assortative matches between school qualities and student abilities sometimes fail to be achieved by the housing market equilibrium, resulting in a misallocation in education. We propose a mechanism that improves school matches by making the property tax imposed on the high-quality house–school bundle deductible conditional on school performance. Conditional deductibility induces a transaction of houses that improves school matches at the cost of a distortion in housing consumption, and we show that: (1) a small and positive tax is strictly welfare-improving; (2) such tax is Pigouvian corrective in terms of alleviating budget constraint; and (3) a lower degree of inter-jurisdictional differentiation in housing enhances the welfare effects of tax.

The design of public subsidies for long-term care (LTC) programmes to support frail, elderly individuals in Europe is subject to both tight budget constraints and increasing demand preassures for care. However, what helps overcoming the constraints that modify LTC entitlements? We provide a unifying explanation of the conditions that facilitate the modification of public financial entitlements to LTC. We build on the concept of ‘implicit partnerships’, an implicit (or ‘silent’) agreement, encompassing the financial co-participation of both public funders, and families either by both allocating time and/or financial resources to caregiving. Next, we provide suggestive evidence of policy reforms modifying public entitlements in seven European countries which can be classified as either ‘implicit user partnerships’ or ‘implicit caregiver partnerships’. Finally, we show that taxpayers attitudes mirror the specific type of implicit partnership each country has adopted. Hence, we conclude that the modification of long-term care entitlements require the formation of some type of ‘implicit partnership'.

Auctions for perishable goods such as internet ad inventory need to make real-time allocation and pricing decisions as the supply of the good arrives in an online manner, without knowing the entire supply in advance. These allocation and pricing decisions get complicated when buyers have some global constraints. In this work, we consider a multi-unit model where buyers have global {\em budget} constraints, and the supply arrives in an online manner. Our main contribution is to show that for this setting there is an individually-rational, incentive-compatible and Pareto-optimal auction that allocates these units and calculates prices on the fly, without knowledge of the total supply. We do so by showing that the Adaptive Clinching Auction satisfies a {\em supply-monotonicity} property. We also analyze and discuss, using examples, how the insights gained by the allocation and payment rule can be applied to design better ad allocation heuristics in practice. Finally, while our main technical result concerns multi-unit supply, we propose a formal model of online supply that captures scenarios beyond multi-unit supply and has applications to sponsored search. We conjecture that our results for multi-unit auctions can be extended to these more general models., Comment: Accepted to SODA'13

Relative to western Europe, we know very little about the determinants of economic growth at the regional level within socialist Europe. This is somewhat unusual, given that socialist policy‐makers have put great emphasis on equitable regional development. This article analyses the regional patterns of growth and divergence in socialist Yugoslavia. New estimates of output and inputs are constructed, and an analysis of output growth, factor accumulation, structural modernization, and productivity is provided. Two novel empirical findings are uncovered. The first is that the sources of growth across the regions were fundamentally different. Total factor productivity was a much more important source of growth in the richer regions than it was in the poorer ones. The second finding is that the source of the regional income divergence lies in the failure of the less developed regions to converge towards the employment rates and total factor productivities of the more developed regions. These failures are interpreted, at least partially, as symptoms of the governing objective and the soft budget constraint of the labour‐managed firms that operated in Yugoslavia. It is argued that Yugoslavia's development model was less suited to the pre‐conditions that prevailed in the less developed parts of the country.

International remittances can increase the income of recipient households, and thus reduce their budget constraints. As such, they may enhance consumption and investment opportunities for family members that remain in the country of origin. This document analyzes the impact of international remittances on child labor and school attendance for children aged between 12 and 18 in Santiago de Cali, Colombia. Using a Propensity Score Matching (PSM) strategy, we find that children in remittance-receiving households are less likely to engage in market work, but no evidence that international remittances may influence school attendance. The results in this document emphasize the importance of remittance income to improve the welfare of children left behind, reducing their exposure to market work, which is one of the targets of the Sustainability and Development Goals.

The soft budget constraint (SBC) is over 40 years old and may seem too well known by now to need elucidation. In this paper, I discuss its origin and its causes. The concept of the soft budget constraint was coined by Janos Kornai, but the origin of the phenomenon that the term captures deserves discussion. Here, I ask why the SBC phenomenon came into being. Kornai considers it a manifestation of paternalism toward SOEs by superior bodies that refuse to let them go under due to symbiotic solidarity with their subordinates. I contend that there are stronger reasons, reasons that inhere in the very core of the bureaucratic allocation system—the method of material balances—that cannot allow enterprises to die just because they generate losses.

In this paper, we generalize the General Lotto game (budget constraints satisfied in expectation) and the Colonel Blotto game (budget constraints hold with probability one) to allow for battlefield valuations that are heterogeneous across battlefields and asymmetric across players and for the players to have asymmetric resource constraints. We completely characterize Nash equilibrium in the generalized version of the General Lotto game and find that there exist sets of nonpathological parameter configurations of positive Lebesgue measure with multiple payoff nonequivalent equilibria. Across equilibria each player achieves a higher payoff when he more aggressively attacks battlefields in which he has lower relative valuations. Hence, the best defense is a good offense. We, then, show how this characterization can be applied to identify equilibria in the Colonel Blotto version of the game.

The article examines János Kornai’s influential argument that “soft budget constraints” impede innovation, and finds that under certain conditions, they may promote it instead. Kornai’s concept is derived from his analysis of socialism. In capitalism, soft budget constraints can promote innovation if competition is enforced and finance is well regulated. This argument is developed using the same Schumpeterian foundation as Kornai, illustrated empirically with the case of innovation in post-war Japan. Implications are relevant for innovation and industrial policy in general.

When modeling a nonequilibrium economy, the behavior of participants is described by the same optimization problems, including the criterion and internal technological and budgetary constraints, as in the theory of Walrasian equilibrium. They are only supplemented by external restrictions on the purchase (or sale) of scarce (slow-moving) products. Various principles are known for establishing these boundaries. They can be fixed (a rigid scheme of rationing) and not depend directly on the decisions of the participant, or be determined by the demand expressed by them (flexible scheme). The presented demand for rationable products, as a rule, does not coincide with the Walrasian one. We will call it an order. In well-known models, the order is considered equal to active demand. The concept of active demand has been successfully used in price control models. However, it is not the object of the choice of participants aimed at optimizing their criteria. Meanwhile, it seems natural that manufacturers and consumers, seeking to maximize utility, are free to choose order sizes at their own discretion. Modeling of the situation arising with this approach is the goal of the present work and is based on a modification of the rationing scheme proposed by J.P. Benassi The work also considers equilibrium models at fixed prices, in which participants, when forming demand, take into account the scarcity of products and the level of satisfaction of orders. Models are used to assess the impact of taxes, government spending, and other macro-regulators on employment and national income. The paper provides an overview of literary sources in the subject area, as well as an economic interpretation of the results.

We investigate the impact of the Czech Republic's membership in the European Union on capital mobility. Our estimation of capital mobility is based on the alternative Feldstein-Horioka model. The model comes from intertemporal budget constraints with the additional assumption of a different data generation process. We propose an empirical framework to capture two different regimes in the vector error correction model. We show that the period 1996-2004 is composed of both regimes. The most important conclusion is that the period 1996-2004 is connected with a mix of both regimes. However, the period 2005-2017 comprises only one regime, which is connected with higher capital mobility. Therefore, capital mobility in the Czech Republic increased after 2004.

This document aims to determine the empirical link between current account balances and a set of economic variables proposed by the theoretical and empirical literature. To do this, we first use a generalized method of moments (GMM) dynamic panel regression technique to identify the key fundamentals of current account balances in certain economies in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. Next, we estimate the link between exports and imports in order to test the sustainability of current account balances. To do this, the authors estimate a threshold cointegration model on a sample of 12 countries from the MENA region over the period 1970–2018. Nevertheless, the results show that the countries of the MENA region must put in place policies aimed at reducing their current account deficits in order to regain their external stability.

The growth of zombie firms has caused increasing concern. The present study seeks to understand why zombie firms have been emerging in recent 10 years and to further explore the mechanisms of their formation. Based on a dataset of Chinese listed companies from 2012 to 2016 and empirical analysis, the present study ascribes the prevalence of zombie firms to soft budget constraints. After using a modified identification model in the Chinese context, we concluded that zombie firms have access to some external resources such as credit support from banks and governmental subsidies, substantiating soft budget constraints among zombie firms. To explain this phenomenon, further analysis reveals that zombie firms bear a heavier policy burden by hiring excess employees, which will bring them more subsidies and a stronger relationship with government in return. This result indicates that policy burden is the reason for soft budget constraints, which exacerbates the zombie firm problems in China.

In a 2007 paper, Blankenau, Simpson, and Tomljanovich (BST) find that public education expenditures have a positive impact on growth only after controlling for the government budget constraint. Thi...

In this paper, we aim to explore the influence of budget constraint privatization policy in the context of mixed duopoly to examine whether privatization policy is dependent upon the unionization structure with labour productivity difference. We showed that, when the unions put equal weights on the wages and the numbers employment, the social welfare pre-privatization is always higher than the one post-privatization regardless of the type of unionization; the government should not privatize the public firm, and nationalization policy should be retained because it will provide a higher rent for the union. Furthermore, union(s) opposes the privatization policy in the presence of budget constraint and union structure.

This study investigates fiscal policy’s sustainability in Nigeria from 1961-2016, using annual data of public revenues and expenditure, all as a ratio of GDP. The study applies ARDL bounds testing cointegration technique to determine an equilibrium relationship between the variables. Also, Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) technique of data analysis is employed to examine the compliance of the government of Nigeria with the budget constraint equation. The results show no equilibrium occurs between public revenue and expenditure, indicating absence of sustainability in the government finances in Nigeria. It is expedient, therefore, that government expands the tax base, reduce tax rates and be cautious in her spending to avoid unproductive expenditure.

This paper examines the prices of basic staples in rural Mexico. We document that nonlinear pricing in the form of quantity discounts is common, that quantity discounts are sizable for basic staples, and that the well‐known conditional cash transfer program Progresa has significantly increased quantity discounts, although the program, as documented in previous studies, has not affected unit prices on average. To account for these patterns, we propose a model of price discrimination that nests those of Maskin and Riley (1984) and Jullien (2000), in which consumers differ in their tastes and, because of subsistence constraints, in their ability to pay for a good. We show that under mild conditions, a model in which consumers face heterogeneous subsistence or budget constraints is equivalent to one in which consumers have access to heterogeneous outside options. We rely on known results to characterize the equilibrium price schedule, which is nonlinear in quantity. We analyze the effect of nonlinear pricing on market participation as well as the impact of a market‐wide transfer, analogous to the Progresa one, when consumers are differentially constrained. We show that the model is structurally identified from data on prices and quantities from a single market under common assumptions. We estimate the model using data on three commonly consumed commodities from municipalities and localities in Mexico. Interestingly, we find that relative to linear pricing, nonlinear pricing is beneficial to a large number of households, including those consuming small quantities, mostly because of the higher degree of market participation that nonlinear pricing induces. We also show that the Progresa transfer has affected the slopes of the price schedules of the three commodities we study, which have become steeper as consistent with our model, leading to an increase in the intensity of price discrimination. Finally, we find that a reduced form of our model, in which the size of quantity discounts depends on the hazard rate of the distribution of quantities purchased in a village, accounts for the shift in price schedules induced by the program.

The article discusses the question of the financial constraints in Estonian dairy and crop farms in the transition period, and there are also identified the farms that have been mostly affected by these imperfections. For that, an investment accelerator model augmented with a cash flow variable was used. The empirical analysis is based on the unbalanced panel data containing 2263 dairy and 1762 crop farms in the period between 2000 and 2014. We have three periods of 5 years each: 2000-2004 (the pre-EU accession), 2005-2009 (being an EU member before the economic crisis), 2010-2014 (after the economic crisis). We used these periods to construct the fixed effect and random effect models for different types of farm: dairy and crop farms. In addition to the full sample estimate, we use farms characteristics to classify crop farms by area, and dairy farms by the average number of cows per year. The estimations of the standard augmented model obtained by different econometric methods for several subsamples have revealed a dissimilar level of the financial constraints. The obtained results clearly imply that the farm investment behavior is driven by the competitive output market conditions and the farm abilities to sell output and invest in such a market environment. Moreover, except for all farms farm the gross investment is positively and significantly associated with the cash flow, confirming for any farms the absence of the soft budget constraints for the farms. The results confirm that the financial variables significantly influence the farms’ investment subsidy, providing an empirical evidence of an imperfect capital market in the Estonian agriculture.

Consider a first‐price sealed‐bid auction with interdependent valuations and private budget constraints. Focusing on the two‐bidder case, we identify new sufficient conditions for the existence of a symmetric equilibrium in pure strategies. In equilibrium, agents may adopt discontinuous bidding strategies that result in a stratification of competition along the budget dimension. Private budgets can simultaneously lead to more aggressive bidding (a high‐budget agent leverages his wealth to outbid rivals) and more subdued bidding (competition becomes less intense among bidders at distinct budget levels). The presence of budget constraints may lead to multiple symmetric equilibria in the first‐price auction.

Employing data from a representative survey conducted in Germany, this paper examines public preferences for the size and composition of government expenditure. We focus on public attitudes towards taxes, public debt incurrence and public spending in six different policy areas. Our findings suggest, first, that individual preferences for the use of additional tax money can be categorised as either capital-oriented expenditure or public debt reduction. Second, we find that fiscal preferences differ along various dimensions. Specifically, personal economic well-being, economic literacy, confidence in politicians, political ideology and time preference are significantly related to individual attitudes towards public spending, taxes and debt. The magnitude of the effects is particularly large for time preference, economic knowledge and party preference. Third, public preferences for public spending priorities are only marginally affected when considering a public budget constraint.

The paper demonstrates the effect of the dividends on pricing and hedging the European contingent claims under a budget constraint and presents insurance applications. Explicit formulae for the quantile pricing and hedging of the European call option are derived assuming the jump-diffusion model of the financial market. These results are used to determine the premium of the pure endowment with fixed guarantee equity-linked life insurance contract as well as the survival probability of the insured. A numerical example is given to illustrate the role of dividends in valuation and risk management of such insurance contracts.

The finances of state governments in India have been facing a hard budget constraint as there is a legislative mandate to run the finances with a ceiling on fiscal deficit at 3% of gross state domestic product (GSDP) and the debt-to-GSDP ratio at 20%. In this paper, we have elucidated the limitations of fiscal deficit as the sole target, particularly in the context of availability of resources to the state budgets. These include: (a) tax devolution and grants based on finance commission awards, (b) discretionary transfers in terms of grants from the union government and (c) borrowings from the market. . Keeping in view the constitutional and institutional flow of resources to the state budget, a resource gap model has been designed in this paper. This is named as Basic Resource Gap (BRG) with three variants (BRG 1, BRG 2 and BRG 3). Based on the BRG, fiscal dependency ratio (FDR) and fiscal stress ratio (FSR) have been worked out in this paper. The empirical findings broadly suggest that in respect of the consolidated position (all states together) nearly 50% of the total resource originated from the dependent and stressed sources. A further breakup of this reveals that while resources from dependent sources were 22%, the resources from stressed source were 28% of the total available resources. This analysis is an analytical improvement over the conventional approach of fiscal deficit. BRG model, besides filling the gap in the literature of fiscal federalism, will be operationally helpful to the state governments in terms of a holistic picture of the resource gap incorporating the constitutional and institutional resource flows to the state budgets based on the accounting arrangements in conformity with consolidated fund and public accounts. In essence, BRG along with FSR and FDR will add analytical rigor to the analysis of hard budget constraints in terms of resource availability to the state governments.

This paper addresses Janos Kornai’s early work on the socialist economy as summarized in his first book, Overcentralization in Economic Administration. In this context, I discuss the parallel research of the 1950s by American scholars, such as Joseph Berliner, David Granick, Gregory Grossman and Eugene Zaleski, who used similar methods and arrived at similar conclusions. Kornai found little evidence of comprehensive planning. Instead, he determined that the planning system consisted of quarterly gross output orders that could readily be manipulated by managers and had to be fulfilled at any price. Kornai’s Overcentralization already contained the seeds of Kornai’s later key findings of the dysfunctionalities of socialist planning; namely, soft budget constraints and the shortage economy. Kornai’s most important finding was largely overlooked throughout the socialist world—that the planned economy could not be reformed by partial measures.

In this paper, we propose a new approach to address the problem of designing pharmaceutical copayments. The rationale for positive copayments in our setting lies in the presence of budgetary constraints and, hence, in the need to raise funds in order to finance the costs of the treatments. We use results from the literature on axiomatic bargaining with claims to incorporate criteria of distributive justice into the design of copayments. We find that if the government constrains patient rights to what is medically feasible, equity-based copayments vary from a percentage of the cost of the treatment, to a flat rate per prescription. If the government also takes into account the burden of disease experienced by patients, then copayments based on equity lead to a relation between copayments and clinical status that diverges from those proposals based on efficiency arguments. In particular, we show that equity-based copayments might be increasing in the health gains that the treatments provide to the patients. The reason is that these copayments try to avoid a “double jeopardy” problem, by ensuring that those patients with a large burden of disease do not face also an important monetary cost.

This article examines the causal effect of debt decentralisation on the budget constraint of subnational governments. China’s debt decentralisation reform of 2011 authorised four provincial-level units to issue debt on their own, but not the remaining ones. Using data on the budgetary expenditure and revenue of Chinese subnational governments from 2009 to 2014, we estimate the effect of the reform with a difference-in-differences approach, with those four provincial units as the treatment group and the others as the control group. Our findings suggest that debt decentralisation can help harden the budget constraint of subnational governments.

Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) ist ein keynesianischer Ansatz, der Geld in den Mittelpunkt der Analyse stellt und die Rolle des Staates in einer geldvermittelten Marktwirtschaft herausarbeitet, in der Vollbeschäftigung weder den Normalfall noch ein Gravitationszentrum darstellt. In der wirtschaftspolitischen Debatte polarisiert MMT durch Aussagen wie ein moderner Staat könne nie ein Solvenzproblem haben und unterliege keiner Budgetrestriktion. Derartige wirtschaftspolitische Schlussfolgerungen vernachlässigen wesentliche Elemente des theoretischen Rahmens und blenden gerade jene Aspekte der Makropolitik aus, die ein Abwägen zwischen verschiedenen Risiken bzw. unterschiedlichen Zielen erfordern. Budgetdefizite können zwar erforderlich sein, um wirtschaftliche Stabilität und einen hohen Beschäftigungsstand zu erreichen, der Staat kann Budgetdefizite aber selbst im Falle von Unterbeschäftigung nicht in beliebiger Höhe monetisieren, da der Wert des Geldes von seiner Knappheit abhängt. Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) is a Keynesian approach that places money at the center of the analysis and highlights the role of the state in a monetary market economy in which full employment is neither the norm nor a center of gravity. In the policy debate, MMT polarizes by claiming a modern state could never have a solvency problem and faces no budget constraint. Such economic policy conclusions neglect essential elements of the theoretical framework and thereby ignore key macroeconomic aspects that require weighing different risks or objectives. Budget deficits may be necessary to achieve economic stability and high employment, but the state cannot monetize budget deficits without limit even in the event of underemployment because the value of money hinges on its scarcity.

As the gap between strategic commitments and budgetary constraints continues to grow, defence organisations have introduced performance management initiatives to support decision-making and to improve governance. However, introducing managerial practices in public organisations, including defence, proves to be challenging. As performance management initiatives within defence suffer from an implementation gap, strategic benefits are not being harnessed. In our study, we first exploit the results of a systematic literature review to better anchor the encountered challenges within the literature. We then apply thematic analysis to a unique dataset from twelve NATO countries to propose a new defence-specific performance management framework for the strategic level. As the framework preserves the benefits of existing initiatives while mitigating most recorded challenges, it is proposed as a new guide for designing and assessing defence performance management efforts. Thereby, professionals and scholars are provided with a powerful instrument to address the implementation gap. Moreover, the theoretical and empirical lens adopted facilitates alignment between performance management initiatives, defence policy, defence strategy, and strategic objectives. Notably, policy goals and strategic “ends” are clearly connected to critical processes and resources. Thereby, the proposed framework better supports discussions with key defence stakeholders pertaining to the gap between commitments and constraints.

This study examines numeraire or an account unit that measures household welfare changes. Although money metric usually determines budget constraint, textbook explanations of the alternative metrics are limited. Therefore, the study aimed to fill the existing gap by systematically and qualitatively analysing previously published articles on environmental valuation in developing countries. The results showed the existence of alternative numeraires in working time, commodities, and financing. The alternative metrics are useful in the valuation of environmental goods and services in developing countries, especially those involving poor respondents and underdeveloped monetary transactions. The nonmonetary payments reduce zero bids due to the inability of subsistence people to pay in cash and help the poor express their true environmental values.

In this article, we consider a variety of different mechanisms through which crises such as COVID-19 can propagate from the micro-economic behaviour of individual agents through to an economy’s aggregate dynamics and subsequently spill over into the global economy. Our central theme is one of changes in the behaviour of heterogeneous agents, agents who differ in terms of some measure of size, wealth, connectivity, or behaviour, in different parts of an economy. These are illustrated through a variety of case studies, from individuals and households with budgetary constraints, to financial markets, to companies composed of thousands of small projects, to companies that implement single multi-billion dollar projects. In each case, we emphasise the role of data or theoretical models and place them in the context of measuring their inter-connectivity and emergent dynamics. Some of these are simple models that need to be `dressed’ in socio-economic data to be used for policy-making, and we give an example of how to do this with housing markets, while others are more similar to archaeological evidence, they provide hints about the bigger picture but have yet to be unified with other results. The result is only an outline of what is possible but it shows that we are drawing closer to an integrated set of concepts, principles, and models. In the final section, we emphasise the potential as well as the limitations and what the future of these methods hold for economics.

Growth dynamics are often explained by insatiable wants or anthropological constants, modelled as preferences and behavioural axioms. By contrast, structural perspectives postulate a growth imperative due to macroeconomic or monetary system-inherent properties. Reconciling both perspectives, we develop a relational structure–agency framework to evaluate growth imperative hypotheses. We analytically separate the credit structure (including balance-sheet mechanics and nominal uncertainty) from institutional structure, and describe decision norms for households, entrepreneurs, commercial banks, central bank, and the state. Our framework suggests that the interplay of credit principles, income-dependent saving and portfolio saving rationales prevent the interest rate from adjusting downwards and thereby cause mature credit economies to stagnate. Underemployment results in growth policies becoming the dominant norm – seeking, under budget constraints, to overcome declining growth rates. Our method helps identifying agency to resolve this imperative. Preventing real asset inflation to relieve monetary policy at the effective lower bound appears essential.

The idea of the carbon budget is a powerful conceptual tool to define and quantify the climate challenge. Whilst scientists present the carbon budget as the geophysical foundation for global net-zero targets, the financial metaphor of a budget implies figuratively the existence of a ‘budget manager’ who oversees the budget balance. Using this fictive character of budget manager as a heuristic device, the paper analyses the roles of carbon dioxide removal (CDR) and solar radiation management (SRM) under a carbon budget. We argue that both CDR and SRM can be understood as ‘technologies of offset’. CDR offsets positive carbon emissions by negative emissions, whereas SRM offsets the warming from positive greenhouse gas forcing by the induced cooling from negative forcing. These offset technologies serve as flexible budgeting tools in two different strategies for budget management: they offer the promise of achieving a balanced budget, but also introduce the possibility for running a budget deficit. The lure of offsetting rests on the flexibility of keeping up an ‘appearance’ of delivering a given budget whilst at the same time easing budget constraints for a certain period of time. The political side-effect of offsetting is to change the stringency of budgetary constraints from being regulated by geophysics to being adjustable by human discretion. As a result, a budget deficit can be normalised as an acceptable fiscal condition. We suggest that the behavioural tendency of policymakers to avoid blame could lead them to resort to using offset technologies to circumvent the admission of failure to secure a given temperature target.

We introduce a prototype agent-based model of the macroeconomy, with budgetary constraints at its core. The model is related to a class of constraint satisfaction problems (CSPs), which has been thoroughly investigated in computer science. The CSP paradigm allows us to propose an alternative price-setting mechanism: given agents' preferences and budgets, what set of prices satisfies the maximum number of agents? Such an approach permits the coupling of production and output within the economy to the allowed level of debt in a simplified framework. Within our model, we identify three different regimes upon varying the amount of debt that each agent can accumulate before defaulting. In presence of a very loose constraint on debt, endogenous crises leading to waves of synchronized bankruptcies are present. In the opposite regime of very tight debt constraining, the bankruptcy rate is extremely high and the economy remains structure-less. In an intermediate regime, the economy is stable with very low bankruptcy rate and no aggregate-level crises. This third regime displays a rich phenomenology:the system spontaneously and dynamically self-organizes in a set of cheap and expensive goods (i.e. some kind of "speciation"), with switches triggered by random fluctuations and feedback loops. Our analysis confirms the central role that debt levels play in the stability of the economy. More generally, our model shows that constraints at the individual scale can generate highly complex patterns at the aggregate level., Comment: 14 Pages, 11 Figures. Updated Journal Reference