A longer-term perspective reveals the historical exhaustion of the financial resources of the democratic interventionist state of the postwar period. German politics present and future is shaped by a deep crisis of public finance. Its current expression is an apparently insurmountable conflict...

This paper takes a closer look at the supposed mechanisms behind German welfare state resilience, which are given in mainstream institutionalist theories. I focus on reform hurdles associated with the make-up of the German welfare state, both at the macro-level (principles) as well as at the...

In recent years, accounting regulation has been internationalized with the extensive use and adoption of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) by nation-states, which points at least to a formal convergence between accounting regulatory systems. However, major differences between...

In diesem Papier untersuchen wir den Wandel von Bildungspolitik in OECD Ländern, im besonderen Tendenzen zur Konvergenz. Vergleichbare Analysen in anderen Teilgebieten der Sozialpolitik sind zu dem Ergebnis gekommen, dass nur bedingt Konvergenzeffekte festzustellen sind, für den Bereich...

Path dependence as a concept in institutional theories has become increasingly popular in economics and other social sciences. The key idea is that in a sequence of events, the latter events are not (completely) independent from those that occurred in the past. Yet, common usage of the concept...