The paper reviews the origins of the comparative study of capitalism and of the diverse approaches applied to it in contemporary political economy. It distinguishes four models accounting for differences in the institutional make-up of national capitalist economies, which it refers to as the...

The dissolution of the standard employment relationship since the 1970s has been paralleled by a destabilization of family relations. The paper, which is a slightly revised version of a plenary lecture at the 2008 Meeting of the German Sociological Association, discusses possible connections...

The paper explores possible frontiers of historical-institutionalist analysis. It argues three points: that progress will require a return from a static to a dynamic perspective in which change is no longer a special case but a universal condition of any social order; that theory must not a...

Skills and skill formation have become central topics in contemporary political economy. This essay traces a key concept in the current debate – the distinction between general and specific skills – back to its diverse origins in American postwar labor economics, comparative industrial...

Rising public debt has been widespread in democratic-capitalist political economies since the 1970s, generally accompanied among other things by weak economic growth, rising unemployment, increasing inequality, growing tax resistance, and declining political participation. Following an initial...

The rise of the consolidation state follows the displacement of the classical tax state, or Steuerstaat, by what I have called the debt state, a process that began in the 1980s in all rich capitalist democracies. Consolidation is the contemporary response to the "fiscal crisis of the state"...