<p>This study analyzes how fiscal rules, the political budget cycle, and political partisanship affect how politicians use an overlooked revenue source: public enterprise dividends. It focuses on Swiss cantonal banks, whose strong growth and surge in profitability since the 1990s have made them significant contributors to cantonal revenues. Public enterprises have historically played a key role in government finance, but their fiscal relevance has declined due to privatization and is often overlooked in the contemporary public finance literature. Using a novel dataset covering Swiss cantons from 1960 to 2020, the study investigates the effects of a stringent debt brake, elections, and left- and right-wing majority governments on the share of cantonal bank profits transferred to cantons. Dynamic two-way fixed-effects models and stacked event studies show that the introduction of a debt brake increases the profit share by about seven percentage points in the long run, with peak effects of up to 20 percentage points in the years following adoption. The results further indicate that electoral effects are noticeable only when the debt brake is in force. In contrast, political partisanship plays no direct role, although transitions to both left- and right-wing majority governments increase the profit share in the short run. These findings suggest that politicians respond to fiscal-rule pressures by tapping a politically “costless” revenue source such as public enterprise dividends. This unintended effect has implications for the sustainability and politicization of public assets.</p>