In comparative political economy it has become commonplace to distinguish between two types of corporate governance systems. In shareholder systems, influence over company management is concentrated with institutional investors holding small percentages of companies' shares. In stakeholder...

To understand how the welfare state adjusts to economic shocks it is important to explain both the genesis of popular preferences and the institutional incentives of governments to respond to these preferences. This paper attempts to do both, using a general theoretical framework and detailed...

Military spending in the West generally declined after the Cold War. Given the economic pressures that many of these states confronted, they can be said to have experienced a fortuitous conjunction of lessening security demands with stable if not rising pressures to allocate more resources to...

This paper examines the development of tax regimes across the OECD countries in the latter part of the 20th century. It pays particular attention to taxes on labor income. A number of results emerge from this examination. First, not only do taxes on labor income represent a major drain on...

Although scholars recognize that time-series-cross-section data typically correlate across both time and space, they tend to model temporal dependence directly, often by lags of dependent variables, but to address spatial interdependence solely as a nuisance to be “corrected” by FGLS or to...

One of the more prominent recent failures in institutional innovation in Germany was the Neuer Markt (1997-2003), a special segment of the Frankfurt stock exchange designed for high-growth companies. Based in part on insights from the law and economics approach to agency theory, which emphasizes...

The concept of institutional complementarity – i.e. the idea that the co-existence of two or more institutions enhances the functioning of each – is increasingly used to explain why institutions are resistant to change and why introducing new institutions into a system often leads to...

This paper analyzes the evolution of inequality and its determinants across different forms of income. A number of results emerge from this effort. First, OECD countries have been and continue to be much more diverse in their distributions of earnings and disposable income than they are in their...

Der Begriff des Wachstumsunternehmens steht für eine der wichtigsten industriepolitischen Weichenstellungen im Deutschland der 90er Jahre. Um die Innovations- und Wachstumseffekte des typischen Hightech-Unternehmens des Silicon Valleys erschließen zu können, wurde versucht, institutionelle...

This paper explores the determinants of individual level support for income redistribution by the government. It argues that there are two sources of preference formation when it comes to redistribution. People are either in favor of income redistribution because they are disadvantaged, or they...