Fiscal Rules and Discretion under Limited Enforcement

Marina Halac and Pierre Yared

No 14218, CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers

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.

Keywords: Private information; Fiscal policy; Deficit bias; Enforcement constraints (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C73 D02 D82 E6 H1 P16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mac
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP14218 (application/pdf)
CEPR Discussion Papers are free to download for our researchers, subscribers and members. If you fall into one of these categories but have trouble downloading our papers, please contact us at subscribers@cepr.org

Related works:
Journal Article: Fiscal Rules and Discretion Under Limited Enforcement (2022)
Working Paper: Fiscal Rules and Discretion under Limited Enforcement (2019)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:14218

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP14218

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers Centre for Economic Policy Research, 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().