Taxation has been a much-discussed subject in the literature on economics and in writings on the role and meaning of the state. Over the centuries, many authors have put forward views of what qualifies as "good" taxation and what constitutes undesirable tax policy. Consensus on these issues has...

The sixteen essays in this book were written to celebrate the ninetieth birthday of Richard Musgrave and to commemorate the tenth anniversary of CES, the Center for Economic Studies at the University of Munich. Musgrave is considered to be a founding father of modern public economics. He belongs...

Risk and transaction costs often provide competing explanations of institutional outcomes. In this paper we argue that they offer opposing predictions regarding the assignment of fixed and variable taxes in a multi-tiered governmental structure. While the central government can pool regional...

Governments in low-income countries have the difficult task of making wide-ranging decisions about public spending, taxation, and borrowing with the aim of helping their countries maintain long-term debt sustainability, achieve higher economic growth, and ultimately reduce poverty. Making such...

This paper investigates economic growth under liquidity constraints by taking into account the choices of fertility, human capital and saving. In a model of four overlapping generations, parents are altruistic towards their offspring and finance their education investment. The government...

In 1905, Georg Friedrich Knapp published The State Theory of Money in his native German, claiming that money is a "creature of law" and not connected to metals via some intrinsic value. When the English translation appeared in 1924, apparently at the wishes of John Maynard Keynes, the German...