IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/rje/randje/v29y1998iautumnp596-609.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Monopoly and Soft Budget Constraint

Author

Listed:
  • Ilya R. Segal

Abstract

A benevolent government may decide to subsidize an unprofitable monopoly whose profits do not capture all the social surplus from its production. Anticipating this, the firm may underinvest in order to become unprofitable and extract state subsidies. The resulting welfare loss may exceed by many times the deadweight cost of monopoly pricing. Committing the firm to a price ceiling may soften its budget constraint and thus reduce welfare. Competition can harden budget constraints in industries in which free entry is socially excessive.

Suggested Citation

  • Ilya R. Segal, 1998. "Monopoly and Soft Budget Constraint," RAND Journal of Economics, The RAND Corporation, vol. 29(3), pages 596-609, Autumn.
    • Handle: RePEc:rje:randje:v:29:y:1998:i:autumn:p:596-609
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0741-6261%28199823%2929%3A3%3C596%3AMASBC%3E2.0.CO%3B2-B&origin=repec
    File Function: full text
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to JSTOR subscribers. See http://www.jstor.org for details.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Alberto Cavaliere & Simona Scabrosetti, 2008. "Privatization And Efficiency: From Principals And Agents To Political Economy," Journal of Economic Surveys, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 22(4), pages 685-710, September.
    2. Hagen, Terje P. & Kaarboe, Oddvar M., 2006. "The Norwegian hospital reform of 2002: Central government takes over ownership of public hospitals," Health Policy, Elsevier, vol. 76(3), pages 320-333, May.
    3. Rizov, Marian, 2008. "Corporate capital structure and how soft budget constraints may affect it," EconStor Open Access Articles and Book Chapters, ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, vol. 22(4), pages 648-684.
    4. Everaert, Greetje M.M., 2004. "The political economy of restructuring and subsidisation: an international perspective," BOFIT Discussion Papers 12/2004, Bank of Finland Institute for Emerging Economies (BOFIT).
    5. Radygin, Alexander & Entov, Revold, 2013. ""Fundamental" theorem of privatization: ideology, evolution, practice," Ekonomicheskaya Politika / Economic Policy, Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration, pages 7-45, December.
    6. Thorsten Janus, 2009. "Aid and the Soft Budget Constraint," Review of Development Economics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 13(2), pages 264-275, May.
    7. Marco Ponti, 2011. "Competition, Regulation and Public Service Obligations," Chapters, in: André de Palma & Robin Lindsey & Emile Quinet & Roger Vickerman (ed.), A Handbook of Transport Economics, chapter 28, Edward Elgar Publishing.
    8. Alexander Radygin & Revold Entov, 2014. "The Fundamental Privatization Theorem: Ideology, Evolution, Practice," Working Papers 0087, Gaidar Institute for Economic Policy, revised 2014.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:rje:randje:v:29:y:1998:i:autumn:p:596-609. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.rje.org .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.