This paper is about the relative impact of retirement and social class on individual attitudes towards welfare state policies in advanced industrial democracies. Which factor is more important in explaining individuals' social policy preferences: socio-economic background or retirement? How can...

As economic internationalization advances, the question of how firms cope with increasing pressure for competitiveness gains momentum. While scholars agree that firms need a competitive advantage, they debate whether firms exploit the comparative advantage of their economy and converge on that...

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...

Huge income differences across countries are a striking feature of the world economy today. Such developmental differences did not exist before the "epoch of modern economic growthʺ (Kuznets). Therefore the question arises why some countries are economically much more successful than others....

For centuries, churches were the main institutional providers of welfare in Europe before the state took over this role in the late 19th century. The influence of modernization theory meant that modern welfare state theorists increasingly regarded religion and its impact on welfare as a relic...

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...