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Fiscal Rules and Discretion under Limited Enforcement

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  • Halac, Marina
  • Yared, Pierre

Abstract

We study a fiscal policy model in which the government is present-biased towards public spending. Society chooses a fiscal rule to trade off the benefit of committing the government to not overspend against the benefit of granting it flexibility to react to privately observed shocks to the value of spending. Unlike prior work, we examine rules under limited enforcement: the government has full policy discretion and can only be incentivized to comply with a rule via the use of penalties which are joint and bounded. We show that optimal incentives must be bang-bang. Moreover, under a distributional condition, the optimal rule is a maximally enforced deficit limit, triggering the largest feasible penalty whenever violated. Violation optimally occurs under high enough shocks if and only if available penalties are weak and such shocks are rare. If the rule is self-enforced in a dynamic setting, penalties take the form of temporary overspending.

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  • Halac, Marina & Yared, Pierre, 2019. "Fiscal Rules and Discretion under Limited Enforcement," CEPR Discussion Papers 14218, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    • Handle: RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:14218
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    2. Niklas Potrafke, 2023. "The Economic Consequences of Fiscal Rules," CESifo Working Paper Series 10765, CESifo.
    3. Carsten Hefeker & Michael Neugart, 2024. "Policy rules and political polarization," Journal of Public Economic Theory, Association for Public Economic Theory, vol. 26(4), August.
    4. Arawatari, Ryo & Ono, Tetsuo, 2021. "Public debt rule breaking by time-inconsistent voters," European Journal of Political Economy, Elsevier, vol. 69(C).
    5. Dotti, Valerio & Janeba, Eckhard, 2023. "Consistent flexibility: Enforcement of deficit rules through political incentives," European Journal of Political Economy, Elsevier, vol. 79(C).
    6. Feld Lars P. & Reuter Wolf Heinrich & Yeter Mustafa, 2019. "Öffentliche Investitionen: Die Schuldenbremse ist nicht das Problem," Perspektiven der Wirtschaftspolitik, De Gruyter, vol. 20(4), pages 292-303, December.
    7. Pagenhardt, Laura & Große Steffen, Christoph & Rieth, Malte, 2021. "Commited to Flexible Fiscal Rules," VfS Annual Conference 2021 (Virtual Conference): Climate Economics 242330, Verein für Socialpolitik / German Economic Association.
    8. Liu, Yan & Wu, Guowei & Xiong, Chen, 2024. "Countercyclical central government transfers incentivize local government overborrowing: Theory and evidence," Economic Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 132(C).
    9. Robert Kraemer & Jonne Lehtimäki, 2023. "Government debt: the impact of fiscal rules at the European and national level," Empirica, Springer;Austrian Institute for Economic Research;Austrian Economic Association, vol. 50(3), pages 783-805, August.
    10. Robert Kraemer & Jonne Lehtimäki, 2024. "Government debt, European Institutions and fiscal rules: a synthetic control approach," International Tax and Public Finance, Springer;International Institute of Public Finance, vol. 31(4), pages 1112-1157, August.
    11. RYO ARAWATARI & Tetsuo Ono, 2024. "Optimal Fiscal Spending and Deviation Rules under Political Uncertainty," Discussion Papers in Economics and Business 24-03, Osaka University, Graduate School of Economics.
    12. Apeti, Ablam Estel & Bambe, Bao-We-Wal & Combes, Jean-Louis & Edoh, Eyah Denise, 2024. "Original sin: Fiscal rules and government debt in foreign currency in developing countries," Journal of Macroeconomics, Elsevier, vol. 80(C).
    13. Díaz-Roldán Carmen & Filho Fernando Ferrari & da Silva Bichara Julimar, 2021. "Fiscal Rules in Economic Crisis: The Trade-off Between Consolidation and Recovery, from a European Perspective," Economics - The Open-Access, Open-Assessment Journal, De Gruyter, vol. 15(1), pages 199-216, January.

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    More about this item

    Keywords

    Private information; Fiscal policy; Deficit bias; Enforcement constraints;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • C73 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Game Theory and Bargaining Theory - - - Stochastic and Dynamic Games; Evolutionary Games
    • D02 - Microeconomics - - General - - - Institutions: Design, Formation, Operations, and Impact
    • D82 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Asymmetric and Private Information; Mechanism Design
    • E6 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Macroeconomic Policy, Macroeconomic Aspects of Public Finance, and General Outlook
    • H1 - Public Economics - - Structure and Scope of Government
    • P16 - Political Economy and Comparative Economic Systems - - Capitalist Economies - - - Capitalist Institutions; Welfare State

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