This paper investigates the political economy of after merger effects of the large scale municipal amalgamations in the German state of Baden-W¨urttemberg in the early 1970s. By exploiting the huge variance in the amalgamation process in terms of number of participating municipalities,...

This paper provides, after a contextualizing introduction, the first-time translation of Walter Eucken’s presentation during the first session of the founding meeting of the Mont Pèlerin Society, April 1-10, 1947. Eucken was the only scholar based in Germany to attend the conference and took...

Should economic policy be guided by rules? In this paper, we take the perspective of the Freiburg School and trace its argument for rule-based Ordnungspolitik back to the roots of the concept. In doing so, will not offer a comprehensive review of the literature, but argue closely along the works...

Vincent Ostrom's legacy is revisited in this paper along three dimensions: Ostrom's contributions as a historian of politico-economic thought, as a complexity theorist, and as an epistemologist. All three dimensions are captured from a perspective which has seldom been studied systematically...

This paper contextualizes the early political economy of Austrian economist and social philosopher F. A. Hayek in the intellectual milieu of German ordoliberalism. It argues that the particular urgency during the 1930s and 1940s to preserve and stabilize the disintegrating orders of economy and...

Collusive agreements in the form of cartels among firms are complex structures. The involved firms need to agree on prices and sales quotas that are legally not enforceable. Market characteristics that foster cartels’ failure or success are widely examined. However, the interplay between the...