Fiscal Rules as Bargaining Chips

Growth in the Shadow of Expropriation

Facundo Piguillem and Alessandro Riboni

The Review of Economic Studies, 2021, vol. 88, issue 5, 2439-2478

Abstract: Most fiscal rules can be overridden by consensus. We show that this does not make them ineffectual. Since fiscal rules determine the outside option in case of disagreement, the opposition uses them as “bargaining chips” to obtain spending concessions. We show that under some conditions this political bargain mitigates the debt-accumulation problem. We analyse various rules and find that when political polarization is high, harsh fiscal rules (e.g. government shutdown) maximize the opposition’s bargaining power and lead to lower debt accumulation. When polarization is low, less strict fiscal limits (e.g. balanced-budget rule) are preferable. Moreover, we find that the optimal fiscal rules could arise in equilibrium by negotiation. Finally, by insuring against power fluctuations, negotiable rules yield higher welfare than hard ones.

Keywords: Fiscal rules; Government debt; Legislative bargaining; Political polarization; Government shutdown; Discretionary spending; H2; H6; D72 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (13)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/restud/rdaa080 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Fiscal Rules as Bargaining Chips (2020)
Working Paper: Fiscal Rules as Bargaining Chips (2018)
Working Paper: Fiscal Rules as Bargaining Chips (2018)
Working Paper: Fiscal Rules as Bargaining Chips (2018)
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:oup:restud:v:88:y:2021:i:5:p:2439-2478.

Access Statistics for this article

The Review of Economic Studies is currently edited by Thomas Chaney, Xavier d’Haultfoeuille, Andrea Galeotti, Bård Harstad, Nir Jaimovich, Katrine Loken, Elias Papaioannou, Vincent Sterk and Noam Yuchtman

More articles in The Review of Economic Studies from Review of Economic Studies Ltd
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().