Does Fiscal Oversight Matter?

Désirée Christofzik and Sebastian Kessing

No 5023, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: A gradually introduced reform of local government accounting made it temporarily likely for municipalities in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia to avoid the effective control of their budget by the authorities in charge with overseeing local government budgets and enforcing the existing fiscal rules. Using this arguably exogenous withdrawal of effective fiscal oversight we identify the effects of fiscal restraints and their enforcement on fiscal outcomes. We find that the withdrawal of oversight has a significant and sizeable effect on per capita debt of local governments that were previously constrained by fiscal oversight. Fiscal restraints are important, and oversight and enforcement are key issues for their success.

Keywords: fiscal oversight; fiscal rules; local government debt (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H72 H74 R10 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cesifo.org/DocDL/cesifo1_wp5023.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Does fiscal oversight matter? (2018)
Working Paper: Does Fiscal Oversight Matter? (2018)
Working Paper: Does fiscal oversight matter? (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:ces:ceswps:_5023

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Klaus Wohlrabe ().