Uncovering the effect of local government debt brakes in Germany using synthetic controls

Steffen Zabler

Local Government Studies, 2022, vol. 48, issue 5, 864-886

Abstract: Strategies for limiting public debt remain a constant issue in public policy and are set to become more salient considering the current high levels of public spending in response to the COVID-19 crisis. One noteworthy strategy has been the introduction of institutional debt brakes. Although public debt at the local level does not necessarily follow the same rules and trends as debt at the national level, debt brakes at the local level are not nearly as comprehensively covered by both public and scholarly debate. The adoption of voluntary debt brakes in several German municipalities in the last decade offers intra-state variance to assess their fiscal effectiveness. A generalised synthetic control analysis is applied to mitigate for the special challenges of causal attribution and rare treatment cases. This approach provides a clear result: on average debt brakes in their present form are unable to limit debt levels in the examined municipalities.

Date: 2022
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DOI: 10.1080/03003930.2021.1986392

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