Incentives for budget discipline in the presence of elections

This paper presents a mechanism to mitigate the adverse consequences of the political budget cycle on social welfare. We use a simplified two-period version of Rogoff's [Rogoff, K., 1990. Equilibrium political budget cycles. American Economic Review 80, 21-36.] rational budget cycle model to address the normative issue of reducing the budget deficit in pre-electoral periods. A regulation consisting of a sanction scheme contingent on fiscal policy joint with a fixed transfer is shown to provide the appropriate incentives for budget discipline in the presence of elections.