The current financial crisis has brought Europe to a critical juncture. In this paper, we map the fiscally United States of Europe. We simulate an optimal EU-wide income tax and calculate the implied cross-country transfers. The comparison of the implied transfers with the real transfers shows...

Bundesfamilienministerin Lisa Paus betont, dass Wirtschaft wie Gesellschaft von einer ökonomischen Gleichstellung von Frauen und Männern profitieren. Individuelle Potenziale könnten besser gehoben, wirtschaftliche Eigenständigkeit ermöglicht, Fachkräfte gesichert und Armutsrisiken von...

With the outbreak of the financial crisis in 2008, European governments extensively intervened to avert a severe economic recession. Taxation is a crucial instrument to achieve such economic objectives, but it also represents a redistributive tool in democratic societies. Generally, left-wing...

There is a huge body of literature in the social sciences that deals with the privatization of public enterprises in developed OECD countries after World War II. In the first part of this article, we present and critically examine empirical findings of comparative inquiries on the factors...

In the post war period, telecommunications - being services of 'general economic interest' - were initially managed by public administrative bodies in many Western European countries. With the rise of New Public Management (NPM) in the 1980s, these bodies were often transformed into public...

This working paper examines the question whether the privatization of network based utilities results from policy diffusion across the OECD world, and if so which diffusion mechanisms have been relevant. Therefore, a completely new panel data set on privatization in the telecommunication sector...

For many years, comparative welfare state research has been afflicted with a sort of methodological nationalism in the sense that countries were treated as independent units. In line with the recent spatial turn in comparative public policy studies, this paper examines with regard to three...