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...

This paper studies the role of agency in the self-enforcement of interfirm contracts. When interfirm transactions are carried out by the agents rather than the owners, the agents' incentive to breach a contract for the benefit of their firm is typically lower than that of the owners if doing so...