The Impact of Fiscal Governance on Bond Markets: Evidence from Late Budgets and State Government Borrowing Costs

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 of 36 US states in the period 1988-1997, we estimate that a budget delay of 30 days has a long run impact on the yield spread between 2 and 10 basis points. States with sufficient liquidity in the form of large reserves face small or no costs from late budgets.