Creative accounting has been a considerable problem in the field of governance and has caused serious economic issues. However, how governments determine the scale of creative accounting is unknown in the existing literature.

We study whether a difference in the usage and the scale of creative accounting is determined by the intensity of the incentive to issue excessive debt. To study this, we focus on municipal mergers, a well-known setting wherein smaller merging municipalities have a stronger incentive to enjoy freeriding and issue debt since the debt burden will be shared and mainly owed by larger merging municipalities. This setting enables us to use the relative population size as a continuous treatment representing the strength of debt issuance incentives, whereas existing papers focused on binary treatments. Utilizing the data of Japanese municipal mergers, we find that governments with small relative populations, which have a strong debt issuance incentive, employed creative accounting more intensively than others. Moreover, we investigate how governments used the money obscured through creative accounting for the first time and find that it was not used to overcome financial difficulties nor increase politicians’ pecuniary gains but to increase resident welfare.

创造性会计一直是治理领域的一个相当大的问题，并引起了严重的经济问题。然而，政府如何确定创造性会计的规模在现有文献中是未知的。

我们研究了创造性会计的使用和规模差异是否取决于发行过度债务的激励强度。为了研究这一点，我们将重点放在市政合并上，这是一种众所周知的设置，其中较小的合并市政当局有更强的动机享受搭便车和发行债务，因为债务负担将由较大的合并市政当局分担并主要承担。这种设置使我们能够使用相对人口规模作为代表债务发行激励强度的连续处理，而现有论文侧重于二元处理。利用日本市政合并的数据，我们发现相对人口较少且具有强烈发债动机的政府比其他政府更频繁地采用创造性会计。而且，