This paper revisits the soft budget constraint problem arising in decentralised countries. Capturing the specific dynamics of political decision making in a federation, new light is shed on the incentives at work when lower-level (state) governments overborrow and are bailed out by the federal...

Looking at the Belgian federation, where 10% of the working population commutes across the borders of three small regions, a case can be made for studying commuting flows in a federal constellation. In this paper, commuting is introduced to a federal setting where an ad valorem residence based...