In the early 1920s, legal and economic experts in the U.S. Treasury Department played a pivotal role in developing U.S. fiscal policy. As scholars have shown, the co-evolution of government institutions and scientific expertise has been fundamental to American state building. But this symbiosis...

Scholars, policy analysts, and lawmakers have long debated the relationship between steeply progressive taxes and economic prosperity. In their recent book, “Taxing the Rich: A History of Fiscal Fairness in the United States and Europe” Kenneth Scheve and David Stasavage take a step back to...

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a group of political economists led the conceptual campaign for a fundamental transformation in the American system of public finance. Responding to the social and political conditions of their times, these public finance economists helped...