To ascertain the prevalence of soft budgets and to find causes of softness, we surveyed 251 privatized Mongolian enterprises, asking whether state aid was expected when financial difficulties arose. One quarter of the enterprises expected such soft-budget aid, a large proportion of which have...

This paper operationalizes Dahlby's (1998) theoretical analysis on the social marginal cost of public funds (SMCF) with microdata on Japanese prime-age males. Our exercise, however, is more than an application. First, we derive the formula for the SMCF that differentiates every individual....