Soft budget constraint refers to the phenomenon that money losing inefficient projects keep on getting subsidies and operating. It was first phrased and analyzed by the late Hungarian economist Janos Kornai when he studied former socialist economies and by now, economists generally have agreed...

In this paper, we discuss the field of government and economics, an emerging body of work that aims to better understand government's role, incentives and behavior in a modern market economy, as well as how government actions shape the economy's performance. In the first part of the paper, we...