Do university graduates pay back the public subsidies which they received as students through higher income taxes? Assuming a life cycle version of the ability-to-pay-principle of taxation as the normative foundation, we suggest the "foregone smoothing benefit" concept (FSB) in order to obtain a...

Whereas in philosophy David Hume was long regarded as a negative thinker to be criticized rather than read, many thinkers interested in social and economic theory from Adam Smith onwards found key concepts, distinctions and problems as developed by Hume useful and inspiring. This applies not...

On the basis of F.B.W. Hermann's Staatswirthschaftliche Untersuchungen and of major German, Austrian and Swedish contributions to public economics, two specific claims with regard to the Germanic influence in the development of public expenditure theory are put forward in this paper. It is...