The paper analyzes the political economy of capitalist transformation in Germany during the first half of the 19th century. Current approaches in institutional economics stress the dependency of economic and political institutions in 'open access orders', which makes economic freedom without...

[Introduction] Walter Eucken (17 January 1891 - 20 March 1950) was the leading and most prominent figure of German liberal economics from the 1920s until well after his death. He represented the convergence between the liberalism of the Austrian school of economics' 'third generation' and the...

We discuss the effect of formal political institutions (electoral systems, fiscal decentralization, presidential and parliamentary regimes) on the extent and direction of income (re-) distribution. Empirical evidence is presented for a large sample of 70 economies and a panel of 13 OECD...

This paper surveys possible motivations for having a net wealth tax. After giving a short overview over the state of wealth taxation in OECD countries, we discuss both popular arguments for such a tax, as well as economic arguments. It is argued that classical normative principles of taxation...

The distinct characteristic in James Buchanan's thinking about federalism in contrast to the traditional theory of fiscal federalism is his view about fiscal competition. In this paper, it is demonstrated that this thinking went through three stages. From the 1950s to the beginning of the 1970s,...

Repatriation taxes reduce the competitiveness of multinational firms from tax credit countries when bidding for targets in low tax countries. This comparative disadvantage with respect to bidders from exemption countries violates ownership neutrality, which results in production inefficiency due...

The university of Freiburg is known as home of the ordo-liberal Freiburg School (Vanberg 1998), a research tradition that was founded in the 1930s by a group of economists and jurists who shared the conviction that a properly functioning market order needs to be framed by appropriate rules, that...

Public choice theory has originally been motivated by the need to correct the asymmetry, widespread in traditional welfare economics, between the motivational assumptions of market participants and policymakers: Those who played the game of politics should also be considered rational and...