The Handbook of Public Finance provides a definitive source, reference, and text for the field of public finance. In 18 chapters it surveys the state of the art - the tradition and breadth of the field but also its current status and recent developments. The Handbook's intellectual foundation...

Expositions of the theory of public finance mostly wrongly assume that taxation is necessary to finance public goods. Taxation isn't necessary to finance public goods because free riding is an institutional artifact of the analytical dichotomy between public and private goods, which prevents...

This essay is written for a Festschrift to commemorate Jürgen Backhaus's contributions to political economy on the occasion of his retirement from the University of Erfurt. Jürgen is a penetrating and wide-ranging scholar from whom I have learned much since we first met in 1974. It would be...