Understanding the Soft Budget Constraint

János Kornai, Eric S. Maskin and Gérard Roland ()

No 19, Economics Working Papers from Institute for Advanced Study, School of Social Science

Abstract: 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.

Date: 2002-06
View list of references View citations in EconPapers

Published in Journal of Economic Literature, 2003, Vol. 41, issue 4, 1095-1136

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sss.ias.edu/publications/papers/econpaper19.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found

Related works:
Journal Article: Understanding the Soft Budget Constraint
Journal Article: Understanding the Soft Budget Constraint (2003)
Journal Article: Understanding the Soft Budget Constraint
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: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ads:wpaper:0019

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Economics Working Papers from Institute for Advanced Study, School of Social Science
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by Nancy Cotterman ().