State-owned enterprises, fiscal transparency, and the circumvention of fiscal rules: The case of Germany

IF 2.3 3区经济学 Q2 ECONOMICS

European Journal of Political Economy Pub Date : 2025-01-01 DOI:10.1016/j.ejpoleco.2024.102633

Friedrich Heinemann , Justus Nover , Paul Steger

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Abstract

State-owned enterprises (SOEs) provide opportunities for a more flexible and market-based provision of public services. At the same time, they may impair fiscal transparency and offer politicians discretion in the presence of strict fiscal rules if these only constrain the core budget. Using a comprehensive micro-data set of German SOEs, this paper studies a possible impact of the German debt brake on SOEs by tracking changes in financial indicators at the firm level that would hint to a circumvention of the rule. The identification exploits that the mounting compliance pressures over the lagged implementation of the debt brake from 2010 to 2020 differs across the 16 states. The results show that SOEs in fiscally more constrained states exhibit a stronger decrease in equity and reserves and a higher increase in debt compared to SOEs in less constrained states and the shorter the distance to the 2020 deadline. This result is based on a combined sample of state and municipal SOEs, a finding pointing towards the vertical spillover of a fiscal rule.

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来源期刊

European Journal of Political Economy Multiple-

CiteScore

3.40

自引率

10.00%

发文量

106

期刊介绍： The aim of the European Journal of Political Economy is to disseminate original theoretical and empirical research on economic phenomena within a scope that encompasses collective decision making, political behavior, and the role of institutions. Contributions are invited from the international community of researchers. Manuscripts must be published in English. Starting 2008, the European Journal of Political Economy is indexed in the Social Sciences Citation Index published by Thomson Scientific (formerly ISI).