As budgetary commitments outpace current revenues and long-term liabilities balloon, the fiscal sustainability of state and local governments is a matter of mounting concern. Over the years, these governments have experimented with a wide variety of political and fiscal institutions, ranging...

We use survey responses by firms to examine the firm-level determinants and effects of political influence, their perception of corruption and prevalence of bribe paying. We find that: (a) measures of political influence and corruption/bribes are uncorrelated at the firm level; (b) firms that...

Does fiscal governance affect government borrowing costs? We operationalize fiscal governance as the ability of governments to pass a budget on time and, using a unique data set on budget enactment dates, analyze the effect of such late budgets on government bond yield spreads. Based on a sample...