The economic tradition of ordoliberalism, understood as the theoretical and policy ideas of the Freiburg School, emerged in 1930s and 1940s Germany. In the years thereafter, it was quickly superseded by Keynesianism and other theories imported from the English-speaking world. The crisis in...

German policy during the Eurozone crisis supposedly follows an ordoliberal tradition. In this paper, we discuss to what extent this contention holds and to what extent Germany pragmatically responded to different crisis phenomena. A proper analysis of ordoliberal thinking reveals that the...

This paper traces the 11,000 year evolution of infrastructure systems during major periods of innovation, expansion and diffusion. Throughout history, the key role of the State is self-evident. Private sector involvement has waxed and waned over millennia, although at times it has been pivotal...

The Reformation provided a powerful source of legitimacy for secularization of governance and enabled the regional authorities to change the institutional structure to eliminate the inefficiencies under the prevailing (Catholic) regime. We investigate this idea in a simple model of regime change...

This study proposes an analytical framework towards behavioral political economy of institutional change. It considers institutional changes as central government’s choices under uncertainty, which are largely driven by the strategic outcomes in a behavioral coordination game between local...

In this paper, we study how the birth of the first universities in Italy affected the emergence of the Italian free cities-states (the commune) in the period 1000-1300 a.d. Exploiting a panel dataset of 121 cities, we show that after the foundation of a new university the distance between each...

In the course of history, a large number of politicians have been assassinated. Rational choice hypotheses are developed and tested using panel data covering more than 100 countries over a period of 20 years. Several strategies, in addition to security measures, are shown to significantly reduce...

Peer reviews and rankings today are the backbone of research governance, but recently came under scrutiny. They take explicitly or implicitly agency theory as a theoretical basis. The emerging psychological economics opens a new perspective. As scholarly research is a mainly curiosity driven...