Local governments in the United States can file for bankruptcy to restructure their debt if allowed by state laws. While some states legislate an unconditional authorization, others conditionally permit local filings, do not give authorization, or intervene in local crises. This paper investigates the impact of state policy adoption on local governments’ revenue to expense ratio, a measure of deficit. While bankruptcy authorizations do not show an impact at the mean, a median locality decreases the revenue–expense ratio after the state adopts an authorization unconditional on state intervention, suggesting a moral hazard effect. Localities with conditionally high deficits, however, increase the ratio upon the adoption of a conditional authorization, possibly because they want to avoid being subjective to conditions placed by states.

如果州法律允许，美国地方政府可以申请破产以重组其债务。一些州立法无条件授权，而另一些州则有条件地允许本地申请，不给予授权或干预当地危机。本文研究了国家政策采用对地方政府收支比（一种衡量赤字）的影响。尽管破产授权并未显示出平均影响，但在国家无条件接受国家干预的情况下，中位数所在地降低了收支比率，表明存在道德风险效应。但是，有条件的赤字较高的地区在采用有条件的授权后会增加比率，这可能是因为它们希望避免受制于国家所设定的条件。