In 2022, Cambridge University Press is publishing a 50th anniversary edition of Geoff Harcourt’s Some Cambridge Controversies in the Theory of Capital. There will be two afterwords, preceded with this introduction: You have before you CUP’s 50th anniversary edition of Geoff Harcourt’s Some...

Despite the importance of the capital gains tax preference, and the controversy it often evokes, there has been relatively little serious scholarly attention paid to the historical development of this highly significant tax provision. This Article seeks to move beyond the normative and...

For nearly all advanced industrialized nation-states, taxation is the central source of public revenue. Indeed, taxation is the one policy area without which nearly all of the other functions and aspects of the modern state would not be possible. Thus, to continue the Bourdieuian metaphor of a...

In the early twentieth century, the taxation of modern business corporations became increasingly important to the development of American democracy. During that time, governments at all levels began to view business corporations not only as sources of badly needed public revenue, but also as...

At the turn of the twentieth century, the U.S. system of public finance underwent a dramatic transformation. The late-nineteenth-century regime of indirect, hidden, partisan, and regressive taxes was eclipsed in the early twentieth century by a direct, transparent, professionally administered,...

As a new field of academic enquiry, applied history has a unique opportunity to learn lessons from other applied fields. In this essay, we set out how we think applied historians can learn from the mistakes of applied economists and economic policymakers in their use, and abuse, of economic...