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...

We analyze the trading of corporate insiders at leading financial institutions during the 2007 to 2009 financial crisis. We find strong evidence of a relation between political connections and informed trading during the period in which TARP funds were disbursed, and that the relation is most...

Using a unique data set based on US commercial banks and county level loan origination for the period 2005-2010, we measure whether banks that benefited from the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) increase small business loan originations. We propose an identification strategy which exploits...